


However Improbable

by EnigmaticInsignia



Category: Sherlock (TV), Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Adult John Watson, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Twilight Fusion, Holmes Family, M/M, Mystery, POV Sherlock Holmes, Post-Breaking Dawn, Suspense, Teen Sherlock, This may be a bad idea, but I'm doing it anyway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2015-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-30 03:23:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1013501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EnigmaticInsignia/pseuds/EnigmaticInsignia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It had been seven years and fifteen days since my father was reported a missing person. Legally, he was dead. Literally, we were burying an empty coffin."</p>
<p>After his father Siger is pronounced legally dead, seventeen-year-old Sherlock Holmes is sent away to Port Angeles. An encounter too peculiar for chance leads him to the overqualified school nurse, John Watson, and into the seemingly impossible puzzle of Siger's disappearance seven years ago.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In Medias Res

**Author's Note:**

> As the idea for this fic was created before series 3, I think it bears specifying that Sherlock's parents in the continuity of this fic aren't intended to be the same as the ones from the show. 
> 
> Given that there are also no vampires involved in Sherlock, I've hoped this will be forgiven.

**Prologue**

I woke up to the sound of screaming. The dim beam of an electronic alarm clock cast over the vacant hospital room. A heart monitor beeped intermittently. An IV bag towered beside my bed, its cord running to my arm. Three distinct voices passed through the paper-thin walls. One shouted above the other distant roars. "Pain… here. Alien… left… ow…!" The stuttering matched expressive aphasia.

I shot upright on my sheet-less mattress, ripped the needle from my arm--not medically advisable, but circumstantially necessary--and pushed the cart away. I didn't belong here, trapped in a room for suicide risks. I wasn't mad. I never had been, not that it mattered anymore.

" _Hope you've got your things together. Hope you are quite prepared to die. Looks like…"_ A song chimed beneath my mattress. The audio quality was hazy, crackling from the speaker of a cheap pay-per-use phone. It wasn't mine.

My paper gown crinkled as I slid off the bed. I reached beneath the mattress to grab the mobile. The call flashed on screen. No number listed, not that I needed it to know who was caling.

The moment the phone was in my hand, the ring tone stopped. A text message appeared. The number was redacted. Two words. " _Knock, knock._ "

A thud pounded at the door. A silhouette stood at the frosted window.

I sprinted towards the nurse's cabinet, dug my fingers into the crevice and tried to pull. It was supposed to be locked, but if I could push something out, I could find a weapon. The door rattled, on the verge of opening. I pulled again. Nothing.

I hunched over the counter and braced for another tug. In the time it would've taken to blink, a knife had pressed at the back of my neck. The blade pointed at where my brain stem would be. Cold fingers pressed around the spot. "Oh, it's so easy to divert you. Keep being this predictable and you'll stop being fun," Moriarty boasted. I could practically hear his disingenuous attempt at a smile.

I lifted my hands off of the counter and started to bow my head. Before I'd budged even a centimeter, he'd grabbed me by the neck, turned me around and pinned me to the wall. The knife and his sharpened fingernails dug into my neck, drawing blood.

I pressed one hand against the wall, pretending to stabilize myself. I used the other to grab the phone off the counter and hide it behind my leg. My fingers wrapped around the keypad, mapping where the letters were so as to type while I spoke.

"There's a record I was here. I disappear, hospital'd be sued for negligence. They'll investigate. You may trick security, but I have files you won't find first. That's not a mess you want to face," I forced myself to maintain eye contact with a veneer of confidence. On the last letter, I pressed send on my text. " _Hospital. Come."_

"Like they did for your dear daddy?" Moriarty paced around me as a vulture to its prey, his eyes still locked on mine. He traced an icy finger across my cheek to my forehead. "You're a lot like him, you know. Curious. Gifted. Eyes like a glacier, so, chilling," he shuddered in the most effeminate way he could manage, still mocking me. His lips curled up, betraying his image of happiness through an unnatural snarl. "Pity about you killing him."

I swallowed my words. I wouldn't panic, not in front of him. "Don't pretend that's true."

In what I could only perceive as a blur, he leaned in towards me so closely I could see his pupils dilating to black. "You honestly think the truth matters, here? That's adorable."

Moriarty lifted his hands off of me and flicked me back to the wall. I glowered. All he did was step back and smile. "Night, love."

The next second, a wave of pain ripped through my arms. I tried to move, but by then he'd already vanished. Both my wrists were sliced deep into the ulnar artery and were bleeding profusely. The plastic knife dropped to the floor, covered in blood. It was the same flimsy, off-white type they served dinner with in the hospital.

It was two in the morning. No one was near. The wounds would look self-inflicted. My hands shook, dropping my mobile. Damn it.

I pinched the skin of my right wrist shut with my left hand and tilted my head sideways to bite the right wound shut. The taste of iron filled my mouth. It had only been a few seconds, yet what was probably a psychosomatic haziness seeped through my mind, obscuring my thoughts with it.

I pressed myself against the nearest object, struggling to stay upright. My left foot nudged the phone. I kicked it towards my left hand and grabbed it. My fingers quivered on the keys as I fumbled through a second text. All I could manage was to send one word, " _Now,"_ before it fell from my grasp once more.


	2. Boredom

**Chapter One**

It had been seven years and fifteen days since my father was reported a missing person. Legally, he was dead. Literally, we were burying an empty coffin.

There was a seventy percent chance it would have been raining. It was odd, then, that it wasn't. I was supposed to be at the funeral. Instead, I was sitting on the front steps of a stranger's mausoleum, sneaking a cigarette and retreating from a eulogy I'd no interest in listening to. I could still hear my oldest brother's voice muffled by the wind.

"When I was eleven, I failed football tryouts. While I was throwing a fit, my father told me this. When he was sixteen, he totaled my grandfather's car. For three years, he worked to pay them back as a cashier at a grocers'. It was a terrible job he hated every second of, but while he was covering a night shift, he met my mother. If he had never crashed that car, he may have never met her. Our lives, every life, is a chain of experiences. Even events which seem terrible will cause some good with time. Death is a part of that. The good of father's passing may not be here yet, but it will come," Sherrinford recited, pausing every two sentences to remember what to say. There may have been flash cards involved.

I took another drag from my crushed cigarette and leaned my head against a pillar of the mausoleum's archway. For a fraction of a second, the world seemed peaceful. Then, I heard footsteps. They were methodically paced, loud and nearly shook the ground beneath me. Mycroft must've stopped dieting, again.

"Mother's looking for you," he announced with all the enthusiasm of vocal software. 

"Not with particular success, it seems."

"She has other obligations."

I drew my cigarette away from my mouth and turned just enough to see Mycroft. My brother was a man of ample skill and idleness, so naturally he was a bureaucrat. Even at twenty-four, he held himself with the stiffly proper posture of an elderly politician. The bottom button of his blazer was undone; no doubt it wouldn't fit otherwise.

"To stand in place while they bury a vacant box. To maintain her image. Or to ignore what a disgrace I am. There's quite the list of options. Do you want to pick, or should I?" I slipped my cigarette into my left hand, reached my right into my pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. I unfolded the page to show it to him. It was a boarding pass for two flights—one for New York and a transfer to Seattle. "Was it her idea to send me or yours?" 

Mycroft paused for a moment, his gaze wandering while he debated how to respond. "You're accusing me and not Sherrinford?"

My eyes lowered with dulled disbelief. "When is it ever Sherrinford?"

Fully aware he wouldn't evade the question, Mycroft sighed internally. "She thinks it'll do you good to get away from Sheffield, go somewhere where you and the police aren't on a first-name basis. One of father's old friends agreed to take you in. Some woman by the name Hudson. Before you ask, we're not paying. She said she owed father a favor."

"Seven years posthumously?"

Mycroft's mouth curled with the suppressed urge to say something else before he replied. "Mother's too tired to fight with you. Sherrinford already parents her. I just started my position at Thames House. It's the best option we have."

"Quite the subjective statement to make with a 'we'."

I turned my back to Mycroft and stared down at the boarding pass. The imprint of the letters reflected through the crumpled paper. Whatever pretense I'd been fed, the meaning of this page had been clear since I'd found the purchase on mother's credit card statement. I was a mistake being covered up.

I raised the page to my eye level, blocking my face from view. "I could burn this ticket. Disappear. If I switched course in New York, you wouldn't know for at least six hours."

"I'd find you in seven. Now put out the cigarette."

I raised the increasingly lopsided cigarette back to my mouth and inhaled. "I thought you were relinquishing parental rights."

"Where did you find that? On the ground?" he asked disdainfully.

"Aunt Rose's pocket. She was planning on quitting," I dismissed.

"Fine. Wallow in your self-imposed isolation. Clearly I can't stop you."

Mycroft stepped down to ground level. There were no footsteps, so I presumed he was lingering, likely staring at my back in frustration. I leaned my head back against the pillar to ignore him.

"Before I go, can you do me a favor and promise me you won't get killed?" Mycroft asked at my back. I took another drag.

"Well, not intentionally."

"Intentionally promise or intentionally die?"

"Either or both. Plane crashes, it's past my control."

Mycroft's plodding footsteps paced away. I waited for thirty before I turned my head towards the grave site. Twenty or so strangers stood around an open pit, watching the casket descend. A few people were sobbing. Most weren't. My mother clung to the arm of her adulterous wealthy boyfriend, weeping for every hesitant pat he would give. Mycroft stood beside Sherrinford and hung his head in a representation of respect. The poses they were taking made it obvious; I may have been dressed as a mourner, but I wasn't one of them. Regardless of what the law claimed or how little I remembered of him, my father wasn't dead to me until I saw a body.

* * *

Three months had passed since the supposed funeral. I'd spent two and a half of them in Port Angeles trapped in perpetual boredom. That included today.

Black pavement and pastel houses passed the windshield in a continuous blur of pseudo-suburbia. Gray skies loomed, threatening rain. The air was saturated with the seemingly eternal stench of fish. The tires of an over-worked economy car rumbled against the pavement. I stared across the passenger-side window, observing my surroundings in disinterest. My eyes stopped on a smudge in the upper left corner. A line, about the same width as two fingers, was streaked across the glass. There were just two typical passengers in this car, only one of whom regularly opened this door. Given that this someone in question was me, it must've been abnormal. 

I raised my right hand to the window, cross-comparing my fingers to the mark."Did Mrs. Turner borrow your car?" I asked towards the panel.

"No, dear, and you can't, either," Mrs. Hudson answered from the driver's seat. I caught a glimpse of her face in the overhead mirror. Her hair was a consistent blonde only dye could cause, her face wrinkled from time, particularly around her eyes and mouth, and her wedding ring, tarnished by at least five years of not caring, clung more snugly to her finger than it had likely been fitted to.

"You should park in the garage, upgrade external security. Someone's been looking inside."

"Are you sure you're not imagining trouble? We haven't had any robbers since there was that catnapping down on Evergreen," Mrs. Hudson questioned, presumably doubtful. The supposed cat-napping had been two months after I moved in. Her neighbor had left a back window open while there was a hole in her fence. The cat was found two days later in the next yard over, hungry, damp and still with his collar on.

"That wasn't deliberate," I answered.

Mrs. Hudson shook her head slightly. "Oh, Mrs. Brown was a wreck for weeks. That was commotion enough."

The car slowed as we rounded a corner. A pair of long, green signs in the shapes of a mountain range stood implanted in the ground. The words 'Port Angeles High School, Home of the Roughriders' extruded from them in bold white font at least thirty years out of date. I stared at the drivers' side of the car, still focused on the interior.

There was enough dust on the dashboard to indicate that if someone had entered the car, they hadn't made contact with anything Mrs. Hudson didn't ordinarily touch. The few mobile items that were present—snow brush, napkins, flashlight, maps—were common and benign, not things people tended to steal. That might explain why the observing party hadn't broken in. Then again, if the viewer had meant to find something valuable, why would they bother to check a cheap car that was chipping paint? Perhaps it was an accident, someone stumbling around in a drunken stupor. Not as if there was much else to do here. 

"If you did want to learn to drive, we could hire a teacher, or I could. I don't mind," Mrs. Hudson offered, misinterpreting me and shattering my concentration.

"I know," I said flatly.

The car came to a complete stop. Mrs. Hudson turned her head away from the window and towards me. She held her position while she stared my way. I returned her gaze through the overhead mirror.

"Sherlock," she called to me, her voice marginally softer than before.

"Mm?"

"We're at school."

"I'm aware."

"Can you please get out of the car, then? I have my podiatrist at nine," she suggested. Oh, urgency. That explained the staring.

I grabbed my rucksack by the strap and pulled it over my shoulder as I climbed out of the car. I kicked the door with the back of my foot, planted my opposite foot on the curb and pivoted to face the parking lot. Mrs. Hudson and the car were stalling just as I was. "You _are_ going to class today, right?" she asked.

I tugged the strap of my bag, shifting it across my back to mimic innocent ignorance. "You're my transport. Where else could I go?"

Either the attempt had worked or she chose not to make it her problem, because Mrs. Hudson pulled the car into drive and left the parking lot.

The better part of a hundred students were wandering the open campus. More would come soon. About three-quarters of them were carrying umbrellas. Nearly all of them had clustered into small groups, engrossed in pointless conversation either face-to-face or through their phones. Their overlapping chatter fused into an indistinct mass of sound. There was no way I was staying.

I closed my eyes, shifted the strap on my shoulder and entered the crowd. A few people glanced at me as I headed towards the door. I avoided eye contact. No one spoke to me. I returned the courtesy and continued on.

Three doors down from my locker to the right side, a classmate was clacking furiously at her phone. Red lips, bloodshot eyes, nails bitten and on the verge of quivering. Relationship drama, most likely. I opened the door to my locker, blocking her from view. My intention had been to grab my roller-blades and leave. Before I could reach them, a white envelope slid out from the opening and onto the tile floor.

I pressed down on the envelope with my foot, pinning it in place, and picked it up. Writing which appeared to say "sherbck hohnes' had been scrawled sloppily across the envelope. The lettering was unsteady, crooked and close-together, likely written with a non-dominant hand. Each 'h' was written as two separate strokes—one an n and the other an l. I'd seen a classmate write this way before. I tore open the envelope and unfolded the piece of stock printer paper inside. The letter consisted of my last yearbook photo with 'x's on my eyes and three words in 12-point comic sans; "KILL YOURSELF, ASSHOLE". Comic sans and caps lock. Even if not through words, he did know how to insult someone.

"Hey, Sherlock. How're you?" a female voice called from my left, disrupting my concentration.

"Bored," I answered automatically. 

My eyes trailed from the letter down to the half of her I could see from behind her locker. Her left stocking was damp and tinted brown at the knee, right intact, legs tense and close together, not accustomed to some form of strain. She was a good three inches higher than normal. Also, the gray cat hair that occasionally dotted her clothes was conspicuously absent from her shoes. New, then. 

"Your trainers need better traction," I concluded.

"Uh?" Her feet shifted. Presumably, she had turned her head around her locker door to face me. I didn't check.

"Your shoes. The outsoles are flat and they have heels inside, No wonder you fell, running in those is a terrible idea."

She paused. "…Okay."

I reached to the top shelf and grabbed my roller blades. The door beside me clicked shut. My door rattled with the impact. The girl paused again, possibly swallowing. "I was about to head to Physics. Would you…?"

I pulled away from my locker door and kicked it shut. The row of lockers rattled as I stepped back. The girl stood diagonally from me, her hands pulled in front of herself in a mousy slouch that matched her intonation. I forced the letter between her hands as I passed by.

"Tell Mr. Whitmore I have the flu. Give this back to Rob Talbot; gap tooth, grey hoodie, sits behind you second period. His mother's girlfriend moved in last week. He's been hostile ever since."

She paused again, her expression stuck in a wide-eyed stare. I flung my skates over my shoulder as I headed for the exit. At least five seconds passed before she spoke.

"Are you sure you don't want to give this to a teacher?" she called at my back. I didn't reply.


	3. Stranger People

**Chapter Two**

I hadn't cared where I went as long as it met two conditions; it wasn't school and I wouldn't be found.

It had been an hour and twenty minute bus ride from the Gateway Transit Center to the town of Forks. Another ten minutes on skates and fifteen on foot had brought me to a back porch overlooking the Calawah river. My headphones were clasped over my ears, steaming radio static. No other beings or buildings were in sight. According to local records, the property behind me was registered to one Carlisle Cullen. No one had lived there for months—seven, specifically—yet no efforts had been made to sell the home or its assets.

I turned to face the house. Three stories. Mostly white, clean, modern. A wall-length window ran along the lower-level family room. The view inside was obscured by dirt and water splotches on the glass. No fingerprints or artificial streak marks, so professionally cleaned. The furniture was pristine, as was the floor. This was a mansion among bugs and mountain lions. If it hadn't been built for someone wealthy, whoever lived this far from society would've been considered obviously mad. Instead, they'd likely infused enough fortune to the local economy to be categorized eccentric. 

I pulled my sleeve over my hand and took a bump key from my pocket. I slowly slid the key into the lock, counting each notch until only one remained. I thrust the key into the door while twisting it simultaneously. The sudden pressure forced the pins in the lock to align, which allowed the mismatched key to turn and me to step inside. I slipped the key back into my pocket, set the lock and shut the door behind me. It wasn't as if I could draw the curtains, so I'd assume the lack of tire tracks, neighbors or English-speaking life forms meant being inconspicuous wasn't a concern.

Excluding the window, the primary point of interest was how little character there was to observe. No television. No food. Musty modern furniture that looked as worn in as it would if plucked straight from a showroom. Perhaps it had. My eyes shifted towards a mural on my left hand side. Graduation caps in any conceivable color had been pinned to the wall. The fabrics were faded differently, so they hadn't been ordered or made at the same time. Odd thrift shopping project, perhaps.

I walked towards that spot on the stairwell with the tentative hope upstairs would have more to show. Three steps up the staircase, the radio scanner in my backpack buzzed with an incoming call. The message passed through my headphones with unusually clear reception for the middle of a forest.

"Unit twelve, 597 at intersection of Forester and Main," the dispatcher reported. Animal cruelty case. Most likely not interesting.

"Animal and injuries?" the officer asked back.

"Deer. Two of them. Bite and scratch marks, looks like an attack dog." A hunter's pet, probably. Unlicensed, if they left the kill behind.

"Check. On route." The radio went silent.

I turned the dial back to the Port Angeles station as I rounded a corner in the hallway into the nearest room. A king-size bed rest in the center, still made. An end table stood on either side. Texts and medical journals filled an overstuffed book shelf. Carlisle and his wife's room, presumably.

I walked to the left table and opened the drawer. Another medical text sat inside. The corner of a glossy photograph stuck out beneath it. I lifted the textbook to see the rest of the image. Seven unusually pale people with identically yellow-brown eyes stared back from the photo; two adults in their mid-20s and five late adolescents. They had no other consistent traits, so not biologically related. Coloration was consistent, so it wasn't photo-shopped, yet something seemed off.

I took my phone from my pocket, opened a facebook browser and ran a search on the graduating class from two years ago. When those profiles showed nothing familiar, I adjusted it to last year. Three profiles and twenty pictures later, I found one. A former classmate Jessica Stanley had posted a photo from an Edward Cullen's wedding on August 13, 2006. It was almost identical. His facial expression had shifted, but his proportions, hair, ears-and-nose-to-face ratio, they were all the same. Must've been taken on the same day. This wouldn't help.

I kept clicking through her album until I found another photo of him, this time lurking at the back of a selfie from Jessica's prom. Edward was still the same. The date the picture was taken and had been posted was over a year apart from the wedding, yet he was still identical. What was the point of maintaining a physical appearance to this kind of detail? Witness protection, perhaps?

My thoughts were disrupted by three muffled knocks. The firm thuds rose through the floor and into the room. Someone was outside.

I peered through the side of the curtain to the front entrance. A man was standing at the door. He was in his mid-twenties, blond. His eyes sank with faint dark circles from exhaustion, not allergies, and he held a cane in his left hand. His right hand hovered near the wood, about to knock again. Time to go.

I folded the physical photograph in quarters and shoved it in my pocket while I ran from the bedroom to the stairs and finally the living room. It would take at least a minute for the stranger to reach the back door with a limp. If I sprinted, and I was, then theoretically I should've made it out the door before he spotted me. I slid to a stop in front of the door, opened the lock and rushed outside. Unfortunately, the porch wrapped around.

"Ah, hello," the stranger called.

The second I heard his voice, I stepped back towards the door. I hadn't set the lock, so I knew it would open. Before I could reach the handle, the stranger stopped. My hand froze over the knob, recalculating.

"Is this your house?" he asked, his tone straddling the line between curiosity and tact.

Now that I was closer, I could see the wear on his clothes, particularly his jumper. With the exception of his legs, his stance seemed upright and close together, possibly from nerves, more likely from habit. The haircut was uniform, vaguely military but overgrown, perhaps former. By the length, it must've been at least two months since discharge. Wearing at least three layers in moderate weather, so, probably accustomed to a warmer climate. Clothes laid flat, minimal pockets, so he couldn't have a weapon with him. Most importantly, his question meant he didn't know I didn't belong here. I could work with that.

"No. Cleaning service. Dr. Cullen brought me in. They didn't tell me to expect a visitor," I lied. I blocked the door by leaning against it, my hand still hovering just above the knob in case he noticed something amiss.

"They wouldn't. I was just stopping in to say hello. Do you expect them back, soon?"

"It's been seven months. No reason to think that'll change now," I stated bluntly.

He paused, hesitating. "Oh. That's disappointing," he stated with too little change in intonation for him to have meant it. He was hiding something. 

"If you have a message for them, you can always leave it with me."

"It's fine. I can call," he dismissed. His stance began to sway further onto his dominant leg, bracing to leave.

I took two steps away from the door as I spoke, approaching him. I made a point of speaking while looking straight towards him. "He disconnected his mobile when he moved. Land line, too, for obvious reasons. I have his email. I'd have to ask him for permission to give it out. What's your name?"

However the stranger responded or chose not to respond, the answer should have meant something. No hesitance was a genuine answer, a moment's pause was likely a lie of statement and no statement at all a lie of omission. He didn't reply immediately. When he did, it was with a twitch-like shake of his head that mimicked a turn to leave. "Don't trouble yourself. It's not that important."

"There's no car in the driveway. You walked here on a limp, of course it's important."

He paused, considering how best to lie.

"John Watson. I was going to apply for his old job. Wanted to be sure he wasn't coming back. We've never met. He won't know me—" Lying, again. John was too young to have finished residency. He couldn't be qualified for that. 

"Yet I wasn't who you were expecting," I interrupted.

"Well, yes—"

"So you knew the Cullens well enough to know I wasn't related to them."

"I saw photographs of the family, and you just told me," he rationalized, barely raising his voice past a conversational tone.

"No, you told me. You stopped yourself and looked to the upper right before you started explaining. That's image construction, also known as lying." I paused to watch his reaction. For someone who kept trying to cover up something, John was unusually calm, which was both admirable and not helping me. 

I took another step closer, invading his personal space, grabbed him by the right hand and stared straight into his dark blue eyes, deliberately not blinking. If he was going to slip up, taking away the natural comfort zone would help cause it. "I know the Cullens were in witness protection. Some truly awful people would like them gone. Prove to me you aren't one of them or I call you in for trespassing," I guessed as if it was a statement.

John's forehead wrinkled with confusion. His stance leveled as he tried to gently pull his hand from mine. "I'm sorry, what?" his tone spiked at the end of the last word. Genuine disbelief. If that theory were true, he hadn't known about it.

I released my grip on John's hand, stepped back and reached into my pocket to find the Cullen family photo. I unfolded the image and held it directly in front of him. "The photographs. They're dated through four years, yet every one of them's identical. Their facial proportions are supposed to shift, but they didn't. What do you think?"

The creases that had formed on John's forehead began to subside. He turned his head towards me. "They're of the same people. Aren't they supposed to look the same?"

I pointed at Edward's face on the picture, then reached into my pocket. I flashed one of the Facebook images of him at John to show him both simultaneously. "No. The size ratio. Ears, nose, hair to some extent. They should grow, yet there's no change. They had to be taken four months apart at most. Pretending they were here longer only makes sense if—"

"Dr. Cullen held his job for five years. That's not true," John stated matter-of-factly. His eyes were locked on me, his expression mildly perplexed, but calm. There were no signs he was lying, at least not intentionally. If that was right, then the photos had to be wrong, or this should have been impossible.

John swayed his weight onto his left leg, as if his consciousness of it was kicking back in. "Are you supposed to be here?" he asked, the very fact he was asking carrying the implication he already knew.

As I took a step away from the door, my headphones began to buzz. The broadcast from the police radio overlapped the world around me. "Seven, a four-five-nine at 221 Baker," the dispatcher recited.

By the time I'd heard the address, the rest of the world faded into the background. It was a break-in at Mrs. Hudson's house, and technically mine.

I pressed my hand over the bottom of my mouth, suppressing my frustration. "The ways in which I'm not surprised," I muttered.

"Copy, suspects present?" the officer asked.

"Stand by." The line whirred with maintained silence.

"What's not a surprise?" John asked.

I jolted to attention. John was standing directly behind me, leaning on his cane. His head tilted as slightly as the rest of his stance, projecting even more confusion. I pushed the door open with my elbow, veered to my right and slid directly past him without a second glance. If I'd looked, it was an opportunity to speak. Best to avoid that.

I hopped off the ledge of the porch, landed cleanly on the ground and gave a tug at the strap of my rucksack. "Lock the door on your way," I called behind me. I didn't hear any footsteps behind me. Good. He wasn't following.

As I was about to round the corner, I took one last glimpse behind me. John was leaning over the railing and watching me overhead. From this angle, his eyes seemed almost black in the dimming light. I could see the edge of a raised, boomerang-shaped scar from beneath his left trouser leg-a bite mark with uneven stitch imprints around it. Prior trauma, likely self-treated, but well. Relatively fresh, if the reddish discoloration was an indication. Explained the limp. It must've been within the past few months since he still had the haircut, perhaps it was the reason he'd been discharged. 

"You know, when someone introduces themselves, most people answer with their name," John shouted back, atypically not hostile about this.

I tightened my grip around the strap and turned my back to him. A smirk crept over my mouth as I walked away. "Think about it!"


	4. A Letter Read

**Chapter Three**

There were four sets of tire tracks imbedded in the mud by Mrs. Hudson’s driveway. Three of them were identical in diameter and print, two of which came from the same car. The last was hers.

I’d seen the police car from down the block. It was sitting in the driveway, attracting remarkably little attention for a quiet street.  The neighbors must have grown bored of spying by now. Mrs. Hudson and an officer in uniform sat on the front porch, their cheeks and noses tinged red from at least an hour waiting in cold. The twenty one to twenty five year old officer's eyebrows lowered with disapproval. The double piercing scars over his right brow wrinkled in kind. The streaked discoloration of partially-removed tattoos formed indents on his knuckles. Former punk turned police. Still proving himself, most likely; explained why the notepad he was clutching was only on the third page.

The officer approached me as I neared the driveway. He held his chin just high enough to look down at me in spite of the fact I was at least 10 cm taller than him. “Sherlock Holmes. Officer Jones of the PAPD. I need to ask you some questions. Where were you between the hours of 11am and 1pm--?”

I reached into my pocket, pulled out two ticket stubs from this afternoon’s bus and flashed them both in his direction.  “On the Clallam route 14 at 9 and 2 to Forks, respectively. The drivers will corroborate, I'm sure. Even with a car, it'd be physically impossible to go there, come here and go back between times."

“How convenient,” Jones sneered.

I strode onto the front porch, placed the tickets in his grasp and turned to Mrs. Hudson. Aside from the wind chill on her cheeks, she looked healthy enough. “I take it you were at your appointment, then?”

“I came back when they called. It was about noon, I think,” she answered.

Jones squinted at the tickets. He shifted his glance from them to me.  “Why the heck did you go to Forks in the middle of a school day?”

“People here know it’s a school day. I prefer not being caught.”

Somehow, Jones’ eyes managed the miracle of narrowing even further. “Then why would you keep the bus receipt?”

“I was listening to the police scanner. Knew I’d need proof. Did you change notebooks mid-investigation?”

“No, I-” Then he didn’t have much to go on. 

“What have you reported missing?” I interrupted.  He glowered back.

“Are you a police officer? No? Then I’ll ask the questions and you answer. That’s how this works.”

“Your primary suspect has an alibi and no motive. That’s not working.”

“Did I tell you who the suspects were?”

“When you started questioning me before providing a context, yes. How much nothing have you found that you’re still speaking to me?”

“They broke a window coming in,” Mrs. Hudson interjected. “That’s all he knew to tell me.” Since I hadn’t seen any damage, said window must have been at the back or the left side of the house. 

“Do you know anyone who might want to harm you or your caretaker?” Jones asked.

“Everyone who talks to me.”

Jones crossed his arms defensively. He raised his chin, subconsciously struggling to look superior. I stared at the front window. The curtains were open. Pots, spoons and tattered packaging were scattered across the kitchen. A crock pot sat in the corner.

I turned from the window towards Mrs. Hudson. “The roast is burning. You may want to check that,” I lied.

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Hudson smiled. Whether it was one of appreciation or understanding, I wasn’t sure. In either case, she took the cue to cross the porch. She paused in front of Jones and the door. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“It’s fine, ma’am. You’ve been plenty helpful already.”

While Mrs. Hudson was opening the door, the surface blocked Jones’ view of the opposite side of the porch. I sprinted to my left. By the time she'd walked inside, I was around the corner. It took at least twenty seconds before I heard footsteps following.

“Hey, get back-!” Jones shouted. I ignored it.

The first wall had been clear, so I continued to the back of the house. The point of entry was obvious. A large rectangle on the ground floor had been sealed with tape and blue painter’s tarp. Flecks of glass were scattered across the patio and partway into the grass.  I tore through the tape and cast the tarp aside. A circular hole about twice the width of a baseball gaped through the top-right corner of the window. Each crack spread like a web across the panel. Someone had smashed it with a circular weapon, direct contact unlikely.

I placed one hand on each side of the frame, propped a foot against the lower ledge and climbed atop it. Large shards of shattered glass pooled beneath the window, too close together for a break of this size. The interior latch at the base of the window was still unlocked. The break was large enough for an arm, but unless the culprit was dual jointed and two meters tall, they’d never reach the latch from this angle.

Jones’ footsteps stomped to a stop. “Step down! You’re contaminating evidence!” he shouted across the porch. I didn’t budge.

“Did you sweep the glass in the interior?” I asked casually.

“No, it’s a crime scene. We don’t touch crime scenes. Get down!”

“And the front door, was that unlocked?”

“I’ll have you arrested for obstruction of justice!” Likely a no, but context made it difficult to tell.

I let go of the window frame and slid down to the pavement. Officer Jones glared at me so intensely it may have recharged some small electrical devices. I kept my hands raised above my head with my palms facing forward, bracing for further berating. Instead, I heard Mrs. Hudson.

“Sherlock! It’s time for dinner!” she called through an open window. I’d owe her for this.

Jones lifted his head, presumably towards her. His expression softened. I stepped as far away from Jones as five seconds would take me and stopped at the edge of the patio. A sliver of glass, barely thicker than a needle, glistened beside my foot. I had to ask.

“One last question. Why do you think they broke the window?” I spoke to the ground.

“Because, it was easier to smash than a door. Go away."

“Wrong. The glass wouldn’t spread in the same direction as the impact, not to the extent of reaching grass. The debris was dumped back inside as a ploy. They deliberately broke the window to tell you they were here, possibly to skew the time of incident.” I tilted my left hand to gesture at the back yard, specifically towards the fence. “Dust the fences for prints. Check the locks for damage. Interview the three adjacent neighbors for the exact time the alarm was set. One of them may know.”

“I don’t take orders from teenagers.”

“Then consider it a suggestion.”

Before he could reply, I rounded the corner and rushed for the door. I had expected to hear a shout behind me, possibly stomping footsteps. Only silence followed.  

I slowed my pace to a casual stroll as I approached the front door. No need to alert the neighbors if I wasn’t being chased. I removed a key from my interior pocket, unlocked the door and stepped inside. The savory, vaguely iron-tainted scent of beef filled the foyer. A few imprints of footprints pressed into the carpet-professional shoes, both the same type, one pair the same size as Officer Jones’. Nothing appeared especially disturbed, otherwise.

I veered to my right and entered the kitchen. Mrs. Hudson stood over the dining table, setting silverware beside two empty plates. I marched directly to the sink, drew the curtains across the window and continued towards the stairs. The subtle clinks of silverware paused.

“You should wash up. Dinner will be out in a minute,” Mrs. Hudson offered. I didn't stop.

“Not coming. Investigating.”

“Alright, dear. Just don’t touch the broken window. One hospital visit per day is more than enough.” She set another piece of silverware on the table. I walked away.

If nothing had been stolen, at the very least something would be misplaced or left behind. It wasn’t as if people broke into someone’s home for entertainment, unless they were me. If that were the case, they wouldn’t summon the police about it.

One by one, I inspected each room in the house. Family room – nothing. Foyer – nothing. Mrs. Hudson’s bedroom – a faux pearl necklace had fallen behind her dresser. Two years old, not of any particular value. Aside from that, still nothing. The last room left to search was my own. 

From an objective standpoint, my room was a mess. This also made it easier to tell what had been tampered with. There was a small indent in the pile of clothes by the door, so I could presume someone else had been inside. That the clothes were gone implied that was Mrs. Hudson doing the wash. The wall adjacent to the door was covered in papers, threads and notes in marker, the residue of attempts to organize my thoughts, none of which were touched. Clothes, books, beakers, electronics and various supplies spilled over the drawers of my open dresser and onto the unmade bed. This wasn’t the disarray I’d left this morning. There were two possibilities, neither of them good, though one was clearly preferable. Either the police had come inside and failed to find the only valuable item in my room, or the intruder had.

I slammed the door behind me and sprang towards my bed. I closed one eye and peered into the space beneath it. A few shirts I recalled putting there and one I didn’t blocked my view. I reached my arm in, brushed them out of the way and looked again. A pair of old trainers sat in place, seemingly undisturbed. I grabbed the right one by the laces and pulled it out regardless. I sat back against the bed, plopped the shoe onto my knee, picked up the insole between my fingers and tossed it aside. The bottom had been hollowed out to form a hidden compartment. My needles and solution were still inside, untouched. Yes. Good.

I pressed the insole back into the shoe, shoved the shoe under my bed and leaned against the mattress to relax. My eyes drifted across the room.The ceiling was undisturbed, as was my fencing sword, my violin and my tea kettle. Then, I saw something. A copy of _the Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allen Poe_ had been stuffed upside-down on a bookshelf it was too crammed to fit on. I hadn’t put it there.

Without budging from my spot, I pried the book from the shelf. There was a slight gap between the pages where another one had been enclosed. I opened to the page. A handwritten letter on torn notebook paper rest inside. The narrow, minuscule scrawl was smeared, presumably by the author’s left hand, as he struggled to write with ink that hadn’t dried between words.

“Dear Sherlock,

Do not show this to anyone after you have read it. Burn it, if you can. More importantly, forgive me. Had I a choice, I would never have left you.

Eight years ago, I became involved with a monster in human form. It was my eventual intent to take revenge. Instead, he forced me into hiding by threatening my family, including you. He has come to Port Angeles. Something is at work. I pray it does not involve you, but have too much sense to assume otherwise.

Do not look for me. Should the time be right to meet, you will know.

Beware James Moriarty.

-          Guess”

It was my father’s writing. Fainter imprints of the same color ink were smudged across the adjacent page. The notebook paper was flimsy but unmarred from folding or travel. This letter had been written inside this room, today.

I rummaged through my dresser drawers until I found my father’s journal. The weathered leather book was in the exact spot I left it with no new creases on the front or spine. I flipped through to a random entry and compared it to the script on the page. A near-perfect match, with the exception of the ‘y’s—they were more lopsided this time. That could be excused. Whoever had been writing did so under duress, and to not have any changes in penmanship in seven years would be unusual. Though, admittedly, no more so than receiving a note from someone who was supposedly dead.

I held the book between both hands to analyze the note more closely. This could be a prank. There were redacted documents with his signature online. It’s possible they could have copied his writing from there. No, it was too much effort for a joke. No one at school would be capable of this. The writer must've been ambidextrous or left-handed, as well as familiar enough with my father to create a passable forgery so quickly that the ink wouldn’t dry between words. Or the letter was genuine.

I folded the note in quarters, set it in my pocket and put the book back on the shelf. There was somewhere else I should be.

Mrs. Hudson was in the kitchen, washing a stack of dishes. She turned her head just enough to look at me as she spoke. “Ah, that’s where you were hiding.”

“Did my father ever mention a James Moriarty?” I asked quickly.

She lifted her hands from the water, wiped them on her dress and opened up the fridge. “If he did, then it's no one I remember. He rarely mentioned friends at work. You could always ask your mother,” and I could also always go impale myself. Anything mother knew, she wouldn’t say, not to me.

I turned towards the stairs to leave once more.  Before I could, Mrs. Hudson pulled a plastic-covered plate of pot roast from the fridge. The wrapping was still coated in condensation from the steam. She held the plate so close to me that the rim poked my arm. “You should take this. Eat it. It won't do either of us any good for you to waste away,” she said sternly. I didn’t budge. She looked back at me with subdued incredulousness. “Is there a reason you’re asking about this person now?”

I took the plate from her grasp and stared at her blankly. “Yes.”

“Can you tell me what that reason is?”

“Wasn’t planning to.”

A brief silence followed.

“The plate's cold. You could use the microwave, heat it before you leave,” she suggested.

“I know.”

My eyes shifted to my right as I veered towards the stairwell. A clock sat on the family room’s mantle. Ten twenty nine. For all purposes short of a medical crisis or attempted murder, the city was dead. I was limited to skimming father’s journal and the internet for now. The search could start tomorrow.

I turned forward and continued upstairs to what was sure to be a restless night. It was more likely than not my father was still near Port Angeles, and I had to find where.  


	5. Doctoring

**Chapter Four**

The following morning passed in a trudge of monotony. Picked at breakfast. My father was still alive. Got dressed. He could've been nearing the other side of the world by now.  Tried to walk past Mrs. Hudson's car to leave home and investigate. She stopped me halfway down the driveway and forced me into the car.

Odds were at least even that my father hadn't left town yet, since he had made reference to a continued presence. Granted, there were ways to communicate without direct contact, like texting or email. Still, it seemed most logical that he’d be staying in close enough range that he’d known where to leave that letter.

Fifteen minutes of wasted time later, I was standing in front of my school. Mrs. Hudson pulled away from the curb. She waited in the same parking spot and watched me intensely until I walked into the building. If I was going to get out of school, I’d have to do it after I entered.

It was early enough before class that I had time to take a detour into the cafeteria. I took two mustard packets from the condiment tray and tucked them in my side pocket. The lunch attendant gave me a strange look. I ignored it. I made a second stop in one of the lesser-used men’s bathrooms to fill my travel mug with hot water. That time, no one saw.  Twenty minutes more, I was sitting in class. I knew it had been twenty because I was watching the clock in the left corner of the room ticking seconds away.

“I assume you’ve read up to act three, so let’s stop looking at the text and consider the implications. At this point, Hamlet has proven his competence in creating his scheme. To us, the reader, his initial motives seem clear, yet as we move forward, we see less of that clarity and more of the madness we may have assumed he was feigning,” the teacher, Mr. K, recited off his lesson plan. K was a stout man, late sixties, spoke with a constant wheeze from chain smoking.  The nicotine stained his fingers. I couldn’t care less what he said.

I heard a tap on the desk beside me. My eyes shifted towards the source. The girl from the adjacent locker was staring in my direction. Her forehead wrinkled with concern.  She shifted closer to my side and whispered discreetly. “You look awful. In the modern definition, not the… are you alright?”

I hunched over the desk, closed my eyes and let out an intentionally shallow breath. “No.”  

She paused for a moment, likely out of concern.  “Then maybe, you…”

“How much of Hamlet’s madness can we assume is false? Think back to the beginning, to his father’s ghost. Did that truly happen, or was it an extension of his decline in sanity?” K lectured with a lack of passion usually reserved for assembly lines workers. 

I pressed one hand against my forehead—the universal signal for being in pain and not wishing to discuss it—and raised the other slightly overhead. I waved for K’s attention. No reply. I continued to hold my hand in mid-air. An intentional quiver ran through my body. My shoulders slouched under the weight of fake strain. I sat in that position for roughly a minute, holding my breath, waiting to be noticed.

The chair to my right shifted across the floor.  “Do you think the nurse would help?” the same girl asked, somehow even more doubtful.  

I slid one hand down my face to clasp it over my mouth. I slammed the other against the front edge of my desk, grasping the desk for support as I rose from my chair.  My eyes widened with strain that was, aside from a moment of holding my breath, completely fake and, if the stares from the rest of the room were a good indication, fairly convincing. I swallowed a mouthful of air as if choking it down, grabbed the handle of my bag and glanced to the teacher. He was staring back. Good.

I made a point of taking as shallow of a breath as possible. “K, can I…“ I cut myself off to lurch forward and choke back another mouthful of air. I spotted a glimpse of concern in the furrow of his eyebrows, enough to assume he believed me.

Before there was an opportunity for him to think about this farther, I pushed my notebooks towards me with my foot, picked them up, grabbed my travel mug and stood. I staggered my breathing as I passed the front desks and sprinted out of the classroom. The door shut behind me.

The corridor was clean, or as much as it would be for another fifteen hours. Aside from me, no one was in sight. I slowed my pace to a natural stagger and pressed my ear against the wall to listen.

“His motives could be easily reinterpreted as paranoid delusions,” the teacher continued. Even through the wall, he was just as monotonous as before.  

The girl from before hesitated to speak. “Mr. K?”

“Is this about the lesson or Holmes?” he asked impatiently.

“Both.” Another pause. “May I go, sir?”

“If he can run out of class, he should make it to the nurse.”

“What if he can’t?”

She was still concerned, the exact opposite of what I needed to get away. Evidently, I’d have to be more convincing.

I lowered myself to my knees, set my travel mug on the floor and unscrewed the lid. Steam rose from the cup. I shoved my hand into my pocket, pulled out the packets of mustard and tore them open. I squeezed them into the water, pressed the lid down and began to shake it.

“Ten minutes, Hooper,” K caved with sustained disapproval, but too little interest to keep arguing. I could practically see him shaking his head at, ah, Hooper. Alphabetical seating. That made sense.

A chair squeaked across the ground, followed by the light but determined click of Hooper’s footsteps. It’d take her thirty seconds to reach the door if she was slow. I turned my back to the door, took the lid off the hot water and mustard concoction, held my breath and gulped it down. One mouthful and I wanted to gag. By the bottom of the glass, my eyes were watering, which, while not the point, was close enough to be irrelevant.

The door squeaked open. Footsteps tapped down the hall at a more rapid pace than normal, plastic heels clicking on the tile. I curled over on the floor, no longer entirely feigning the disgust lurching in my throat, and hobbled to my feet. Her voice chimed behind me.

“I can run, get the nurse here. You can stay, avoid collapsing,” she rushed to say, stumbling on her words and also a bit on her footwear.

I pressed one hand to the forehead and the other to the wall to support myself.  “Go away,” I ordered, feigning breathlessness.

“But you aren’t-“

“Go away!”

The sudden noise startled her enough to stop her mid-step. She stood in place, staring at a loss for what to do. I lifted my hand off of the wall and stumbled forward. The searing in my throat was progressively worse. My steps slowed down accordingly. Still, they were faster than Hooper’s, who hadn’t budged at all.

I straightened my posture with as much authority as I could manage in spite of my churning stomach. “Farther. Go farther.”

“But, the nurse. You really should…”  

My throat tightened as I struggled to speak over her. “Get back to class. I’m fi-

Before I could so much as finish the word, I vomited on the floor.  It was atypically yellow, which may have been suspect if not for the fact that people didn’t tend to examine vomit.

The hand I’d meant to hold myself back with latched onto the wall for support. I leaned against it, struggling to stand. Hooper’s footsteps clicked against the ground as she ran to my side.

Hooper took me by the arm and gently pulled me down the hallway. I tried to turn my arm out of her grasp to walk on my own. It didn’t work. She was holding too tightly, and opening my mouth wasn’t likely to result in words.  Small as they were, each step forward sent another wave of instability through my head. I shut my eyes, leaned as far away as possible and concentrated on not being sick until there was someone to prove it to.

What seemed to be hours later, Hooper came to a stop. She lifted her hand off of my shoulder. Two loud knocks pounded at a wooden door, presumably hers. “Excuse me, nurse?” she called.

I leaned my side against the doorway and opened my eyes just a bit to the door beside me. It was my first time in the northwest section of the school.  Nothing was familiar, yet nothing stood out aside from the worn, overly polished nurse’s office door. There was a temporary name-tag printed on a label-maker stuck to the nameplate beside it.  The two names stared back in glossy black lettering. John Watson.

My pulse and my perception froze simultaneously as I stared at the tag. Hooper tapped her palm against the door. “Nurse!”

The door rattled from the other side, footsteps clamoring, the second more loudly than the first, as if two impacts were made in unison. One of those clicks was a cane. He opened the door.

I did my best not to look, though I caught a glimpse of him in my peripheral view. His jumper was faded gray, wool, and likely too heavy for the weather. His deep eyes still sank with exhaustion and his stance did the same. It was him.

“He threw up in the hallway. That's why he's, not, well,” Hooper struggled to explain, hesitance seeping into every quiet word.

The cane stopped clicking just beside the door. The slide of his opposite foot sounded as if he turned to her. “Thanks. You can head back to class, now.” John’s foot shifted again, presumably to face me. “Lie down. I’ll bring you a pail. Can you drink something?” he asked as if we hadn’t caught each other sneaking around an empty house an hour away for no clear nor admissable reason. 

I couldn’t stay. “I don’t want to,” I muttered.

“Do it anyway. It'll help"

I stared past the doorway, into the nurse’s office, John’s office. Two windows with safety locks were implanted in the walls. It was accessible, a few meter drop, but I couldn’t walk out while he was watching, which meant he had to leave. An old computer and a corded phone rest on the small yet organized desk a few feet between each of the two cots. Medical supplies in marked plastic containers rest along the counters, the same lettering as the door, so likely not organized by him. A single person bathroom was built to the left side. If I locked myself in the room and turned on the water, I could use my mobile to call him to the office.  No, that’d take too long. What about the phone?

I slipped past the pair in the doorway and staggered towards the cots, intentionally slouching to one side so as to look off balance if anyone was watching. I presumed they weren’t since I could hear Hooper and a distinct lack of other footsteps in the background.

“I had to hold him up to walk him here, if that changes anything."

“Thank you.”

“I’ll keep extra notes, if you want them. Feel better soon, if you can, which isn’t in your control much, outside of resting, maybe. I mean, bye.” Hooper’s footsteps pattered away from the door. John’s didn’t. The door clicked shut.

Before John had more of an opportunity to look closely, I angled my foot at a slant on my next step and tripped myself on nothing. I leaned towards my left and fumbled to grab the nearest object, which intentionally happened to be the edge of John’s desk. Papers, a calendar and a couple of pens slid off the desk as I reached for the phone. The desk slipped from my grasp, also on purpose, though I managed to hold onto the phone line. I fell face-down to the floor.

A sudden clamor sounded behind as John rushed over as quickly as the cane would allow. I slipped a hand into my pocket for scissors I'd been carrying and discreetly cut through the cord. The moment he tried to make a phone call from the school line, he’d have to leave. All I had to do was wait.

John’s hand nudged at my shoulder. “Can you stand?” He extended a hand from my left, technically in front of me. I pressed both my hands to the ground, tucking the scissors up my sleeve in the process, and forced myself to stand. I slipped as far back and to my left as possible to evade his grasp. 

John stared directly at me. His right hand drifted back to his side, his palm still open. I could see the wear on his fingers and a lingering stiffness in his posture. A lump formed in my throat at the sight. I sat down on the cot and averted my gaze. It was a dead giveaway I had something to hide, but at least he wouldn't know what.

From the corner of my eye, I saw John look away as well. He gathered the papers off the ground, tapped them against the edge of his desk, set the stack back in place and moved on. It wasn’t until he was standing in front of me that I’d realized he had picked up two cups and a plastic bucket.

John held the bucket in front of my face until I took it from him. I wrapped one arm around it and slouched over the opening. He then extended the two plastic cups I didn’t bother looking at. “If you have to but you think you can make it, you can also use the bathroom. I have Gatorade or water. Pick one.” he offered.

“No.”

“You’ll dehydrate.”

My eyes shifted to the tiny plastic cups, and then to him. “How do I know they aren’t poisoned?”

A look of confusion settled in his face. His forehead wrinkled accordingly. "Because they're sealed bottles. Why would I poison you?” Good enough.

I picked the water off of the tray, raised it to my mouth and took the smallest sip I could manage. It was disgustingly sweet, as to be expected. I crumpled the empty cup in my hand and tossed it in my bucket. My focus lingered on John. If I stayed quiet, I ran a risk of him mentioning a topic that shouldn’t be discussed. It was better I start.

“Must be degrading,” I muttered.

“Excuse me, what?”

“Discharged from the military means discharged from your residency. You're an MD, yet you're storing inhalers and clogging nosebleeds. That’s degrading.”

It took a moment for John to break his confusion long enough to decide what to say. His eyes narrowed in a perplexed squint. “Did you google me?”

“No.”

“Then how did you know? I never said.”

“Well,” I lifted my hand out of the bucket and pointed to John’s head. “Haircut's overgrown but military standard, a few months out. Posture roughly upright, also military, with the exception of your left leg. Wouldn't be in service with that limp. Not mentioning the tan marks.” Halfway through the second sentence, my eyes wandered towards his book shelf. “USMLE study guides are recent, well kept, not yellow, roughly one, two years out of date. If you were just starting, they'd be new, so, you passed. Your hands're evenly rough, worn by glove powder with an unusual amount of wear on your right thumb and index fingers on the tip and lower half. Surgical instruments. You've been practicing for an extended period of time, implying you were doing so there. It's November, so you can’t have finished. Residency matches come in March, so, you're waiting.”

By the time I’d reached the end of my sentence, my throat was sore. My stomach churned with the threat of being sick again. I leaned over my bucket accordingly, though my focus shifted back to John.

He tightened his grip on his cane, his fingers squeezing tightly with a mix of stress and, for some reason, astonishment. “Do you do that with everything?  Extreme deductive reasoning?”

“Abductive. Deductive’s certainty. Abductive’s likelihood in context. It’s different. But yes,” I tried not to gag.

John closed his eyes. He exhaled slowly, forcing an outward calm as best he could. “If you don't ask why or mention where we both know I was, I’ll return the favor,” he offered. In other words, he had something to hide, and it was significant enough for me to unsettle him.

“I was bored.”

Yet again, he squinted at me, though this time with considerably more worry. “What?”

“That’s why I was at the house. Boredom.”

“I wasn’t asking."

“Wouldn’t ask you, either. You wouldn't reply.”

John extended his hand towards my shoulder in an offer of something. I leaned away accordingly. “Can you lift your head? I need to take your temperature,” he insisted in the least subtle subject change possible.

“I don’t have a fever.”

“Yes, but I have paperwork. Roll over, please.”

Great. I was being patronized on the same level as a trained dog. “Yes, master,” I answered flatly. I shifted across the bed so I was facing John at one of the most awkward angles I could manage. My left foot dangled off the cot and poked into John’s side.

John reached around my equally flopped arm and pressed his thermometer into my ear. I lay completely still, staring at him with a deliberately uncomfortable amount of focus. He avoided eye contact.

The thermometer beeped. John pulled back. My shoulders slouched, my head hovering over the bucket as a second wave of nausea overtook me.

“Ninety nine point five. You do have a fever,” John stated.

I tried not to gag. “Then the thermometer broke.”

John struggled not to express his disapproval. I assumed he was disapproving since it took him ten seconds to answer. “I’ll be right back.”

John’s footsteps pat softly against the floor. Three seconds later, a cabinet door squeaked open. He rummaged through the shelf, searching for something I didn’t care to speculate on. I was too entranced by my thoughts and the bottom of my empty bucket to notice. Three uneventful months in a numbing town, then yesterday two incidents occurred simultaneously. That couldn’t be a fluke, could it?

I swallowed the building urge and poked my head out from the bucket towards John. “Have you ever heard of James Moriarty?”

“I don’t think so, no. Is he someone I should know?” he asked back, as surprised by the question as he had been everything else I’d said.

“Not sure.”

The wheels of an office chair rattled over wood as John sat down. His filing cabinet slid open, clicking at the final notch. “I'm going to call your parents to pick you up. You should lie there until they come,” John instructed.

I coughed into the bucket. “My mother’s in England. We’d be here ‘til Saturday.”

John plucked my file from the cabinet. He opened it against the desk. “Your guardian, then.”

“Mrs. Hudson.”

“Mrs. Hudson, then.”

John turned the page to see the back of my medical file. He entered the numbers into the key pad, picked up the headpiece and pressed call. His expression froze momentarily, presumably the result of the absent dial tone. He rolled back his chair, leaned under his desk and pulled at the phone’s cord. The cord, specifically the frayed tear, rose accordingly. His gaze turned to me with subtle exasperation. He leaned upright and reached for his mobile.

“She won’t answer an unknown number,” I announced.

John set his mobile on the desk. He pushed his weight against his cane to stand up. “I’ll be right back, have to find a phone. Stay there and keep resting.”

“Understood."

I lowered my head into the bucket and waited for the door to shut. When it did, I counted the pace of John’s footsteps. Every three seconds, another one passed. Even when I couldn’t hear him, I could tell. I waited until he would have reached a fork in the hallway to stand. I exchanged the empty pail for the rucksack I’d dragged in and headed towards the door. I took about three steps before I paused at John’s desk.

Aside from the open filing cabinet, my documentation and his phone, the clutter hadn’t changed. His flip-phone was perpendicular to his computer’s key board. I opened the phone and clicked through the menu for his contact list. There were about twenty names. Oddly, none of those numbers were listed by a familial relationship, only given names. None of their surnames started with M. The top of the list showed John’s own number. 425-224-0587. The area code wasn’t from Port Angeles.

Ten seconds of analysis later, I pulled my hand away from the phone to pick up a pen instead. I removed two slips of paper from the pad of sick notes, pressed the pages to an open part of the desk, forged an excuse and left. I presumed John had gone to the front office, so I turned in the opposite direction. My feet dragged more lethargically than I anticipated, but aside from the slight impairment in stability, I was fine. I paced down the empty hallway and out of the school.


	6. Hospitality

**Chapter Five**

There were more than twenty two hotels considered to be in Port Angeles. Ten of them ran around or between First St. and East Front St. I started at the Day’s Inn and worked my way towards the seaport. If father wasn’t staying in this range, I could catch a bus from there. I could only guess what pseudonym he would be using, so calling wasn’t an option. I had to go in person.

Of the eight hotels I’d stopped in thus far, five of them were clueless, two were hostile and the last buzzed a man downstairs only for him to show up in a bathrobe post-coitus. He was married, hadn't been there with his wife, and was drunk to the point of potentially poisoning himself. I chose not to mention it.

My ninth stop stood ahead, masking the subtle decay of at least a decade without renovation behind an otherwise clean exterior. The windows, walls and doors were roughly intact, but the chips on the railing had been painted over without sanding and the partial discoloration of the roofing tiles from black to gray revealed the building’s age. An equally faded sign, once red, now maroon, with yellow block letters deemed the beige-and-brick motel ‘The Port Angeles Inn.” The word ‘vacancy’ glowed faintly pink, its intended pigment barely visible in the daylight.

I opened the door to the entrance. A rusting jingle bell clanked against the cracking wood as I stepped inside.

The lobby was small, hardly bigger than a walk-in closet with slightly more decorum. Floral curtains cast over the window. A pair of saggy arm chairs, reupholstered non-professionally, sat beneath it. A faded wooden desk rest between the lobby and a glass door to the administrative office, blocking the room from pedestrian access. Just past said door, a clerk hunched over an outdated computer, transcribing data from handwritten pages onto the PC. Room keys hung along the wall above her. Four sets were missing.

I pressed one hand along the desk to steady myself and stared down. A jar of biscuits—stale—and a call bell rest in reach. A second computer running a default screen-saver faced opposite. I could see the default text scroll reflected off the glass door. Various files were stacked beside the monitor. The handwriting matched on every form, so, no point looking closer. I rang the bell.

The clerk jolted upright. She snapped her head towards the door, glimpsing anxiously back at me. Once she’d confirmed I wasn’t dead or dying, she turned away to gather the paperwork instead. “Just a moment!” she shouted through the glass.

I pulled away from the desk and reached for my wallet. Everything I needed was as accessible as it had been the last seven times. I skimmed through the photographs regardless, putting forth an effort to look appropriately distracted.

The clerk rushed over to the front desk. Her frizzy hair scattered across her face as would a mane. She was young, early twenties, with heavy freckles and an ill-fitting sweater, which, if the stretched, sagging portion around her chest was any indication, she’d received second-hand. Her name tag deemed her Terry.

“Are you checking in?” the supposed Terry chirped with an eager smile, at least partly genuine, but over-dramatically so.

My eyes and stance shifted upright, as if I wasn’t paying attention. I swallowed uncomfortably. “No. I’m checking people. I’m really sorry to bother you. This won’t take long, I just,” I trailed off, my tone weighed down with worry. I’d get more sympathy with concern.

I flipped my wallet to the sixth photo, the same one I’d been using all day. It was a clipped version of my family photo from eight years ago, cut down to only show my father’s face. I exhaled heavily, my breath shaking with false anxiety. “My father disappeared yesterday. His name’s Siger Holmes. My mum and I are looking for him. He has PTSD and is prone to fugue states, so he could think he has another name if he’s having an episode. If you could show this picture to the staff, see if he wandered by, or maybe checked in, even, it could really help,” I lied.

The further I got into my sentence, the more Terry’s smile vanished. She stared at me for a moment longer than felt natural, worried, but unsure of what to say. She swallowed discreetly, attempting and failing to mask her confusion. “Fugue states?”

“Bouts of temporary amnesia. Like multiple personality disorder, but shorter and less consistent.”

“Ah.” Her forehead relaxed slightly. “Can’t you call the cops or something?”

“We did. He’s not considered a missing person ‘til tomorrow. They won’t help.” I paused for just long enough to take a breath, set the photo on the counter and slouch pitifully before looking up to her again. “Please, Terry, just, check. If he’s not here, I’ll go.”

A few seconds of hesitating later, Terry picked up the photo. Her eyes narrowed as she squinted at the details. A look of recognition came over her. He’d been here? “Ah, yeah. Yep. He’s a lot skinnier, but, yeah. He was here. Checked out, like, an hour ago.”

“Was he using his name?” I asked so suddenly, she’d barely finished speaking.

She shook her head. “Don’t think so.”

“What was the charge under?”

“One sec.” Terry jostled the mouse, turning the screen-saver off. She clicked through the start menu to find the list of check-ins and check-outs. I did my best to appear as if I wasn’t staring while doing exactly that.

Five clicks later, the information popped on screen. I watched through the reflection. A single bed room rented for two nights. Check out time slightly after noon. There was a credit card attached to the account.

“Samuel Moran,” Terry read in in unison. According to the document, the resident had an ID to match it, though a copy of the license wasn’t recorded. If this was father, it meant this was pre-meditated. He'd also paid for parking.

“What about his room? Did he have a car?” I asked.

“I’m not, uh…” Terry clicked down the page, searching for what I knew she would find. She clicked on the line. “Uh, yeah. Yeah, there’s a car, here.”

“What’s the license plate?”

From what I could see, that information wasn’t listed with the motel’s primary guest information, but if they’d recorded it somewhere, I could use the license number to determine where the car was from, possibly even track it to the rental agency.

Terry nodded again, this time more shallowly than before. “Yeah. Let me…”

Her sentence was interrupted by the click of metal soles knocking against the wooden floor. A fellow employee approached the desk. His shoulders were held high, his hairline receding and he wore the stern, disgusted look of someone confronting a child who had just dumped a bucket of slugs on his dinner.

“Terry,” he cleared his throat, his voice scratching with a rasp brought on by serious bronchitis or, more likely, chain smoking. “A maid just walked in on a couple in their bathroom. Go calm them down.”

She lifted her head from the screen, startled to attention. “Just a second, sir. Finishing with a customer. I’ll be right there.”

Any hope that she’d stay was crushed by his cold stare. “I’ll take care of it. Go,” he barked.

Terry nodded submissively. “Yes, sir.”

Terry stood up from her desk. Her manager loomed beside me, considerably less approachable than someone in the service industry should ever look.

“How may I help you?” he asked, unenthusiastic. I was fairly sure he wouldn’t.

I lowered my head in an effort to look pitiful, again, though considerably less so than before. It wasn’t worth the energy. “My father’s missing. He’s sick. That girl, Terry, she thought she’d seen him check out a few hours ago, used a credit card registered to Samuel Moran,” I picked up my father’s photo to show it to the manager as well. “He had a car with him. She was just about to give me the license plate number so I could track him.”

He squinted at me with a combination of suspicion and skepticism. “Shouldn’t the police be here, then?”

“Disappeared last night. He’s not considered missing for another twenty seven hours, technically,” I half-admitted. His expression stayed stagnant. I pressed my hand over my mouth and looked away, pretending I was trying and failing not to look distraught. “But he goes into these fugue states, and if he’s off his heart medication too long, he could have a heart attack and not even know why. I have to find him, or, I don’t...”

His expression relaxed slightly, but barely. “Does your mother know his license plate number?”

I shook my head into my hand. “His car’s in the driveway. He must’ve took someone else’s…”

“I’m sorry, but, that kind of information’s confidential. If you can bring back an officer, or maybe your mother, I can show her the records.”

“But he, it could save his life. Please…” I looked up through widened eyes. His expression didn’t budge.

“I would need a warrant or your mother. I’m sorry.” No concern. This wasn’t working.

My eyes shifted towards the wall, mentally recalibrating. If I couldn’t get the information directly, their back office looked accessible. One fake call from a guest would force him to leave. The keys were in the back room, the maids were still cleaning and I had father’s room number. If I were lucky, I could break in.

My thoughts were interrupted by my phone vibrating in my front left pocket. I lifted my hand from my mouth and gestured to the side. “Excuse me.”

Before I could see a response, I turned my back to the desk, reached into said pocket and walked out. I stared at the lock screen to the incoming call. The number was unlisted. I picked up as I left the office. The silence on the other line was absolute—no clicks, cars, chatters or anything even remotely identifying, which meant it was deliberately designed not to be identified. The caller wasn’t speaking.

I leaned back against a pot beside the doorway, settling in for the lecture to come. The manager watched me with a wary eye through the back office window. I ignored him.

“Mycroft, why’d you redact your number?” I asked dryly.

Sure enough, his voice replied. “Because if you knew it was me and I wasn’t hiding, you wouldn’t have answered. Hudson’s looking for you.”

In other words, he’d called to track my location. Even with my GPS chip disabled, which it was, he could use the cell towers to triangulate where I was. No doubt he had the moment he’d started calling.

“Should you really be using government resources to track mobile phones?” I asked back.

“Less questionable than skipping school to stalk strangers.”

“Not what I’m doing.”

“She implied otherwise.”

“You’re inferring what she’s implying is correct, which it’s not.” I paused for a moment, considering why he would have said what he did. Mycroft couldn’t know about father’s letter, but I had mentioned the name he’d written. My expression lowered accordingly. “She mentioned the name, didn’t she?”

“James Moriarty? Yes."

I tried not to sigh and turned my head back towards the window. The manager was still staring at me. I turned away. “So, what’d you find?”

“I have a job, here. One that doesn’t involve abusing government resources to indulge my little brother's hobby of playing _Where’s Wally?_ with actual people,” he stated with as much authority as he could muster. He knew something—wouldn’t be that defensive, otherwise.

“But it does involve stalking me. What’d you find?”

I could practically hear his exasperation through the silence. “Call from Mrs. Hudson’s phone. I’ll tell you, then.”

“But your number’s redacted.”

“You know my number.” He was baiting me for a reason. Something had to be off. If everything had come back clear, it would have made more sense to tell me I was obsessing over nothing and send me home discouraged.

“So, nothing on the database, then. Interesting. You ask section six?” I guessed.

“We’re not discussing this.” In other words, they had nothing.

“First name’s common, surname common enough, yet there’s no one? Strange.”

As Mycroft started to voice some retort I didn’t care about, my phone chimed with a text. I pulled the phone away from my ear, selected the speaker option and flipped to the messages menu.

“I’m going to ca-“ his voice crackled.

I cut him off. “Not listening.”

A text message popped up on screen. The number wasn’t logged in my contacts, but I recognized it from the emergency contacts list on Mrs. Hudson’s fridge back home. It was one of her friends, the one who lost her cat.

_I just got a call from your mother. Your aunt was in a car accident. The doctors aren’t sure she’ll make it through the day. Your mother sent a ticket for the next flight out. Where are you? I’ll meet you. This is Mrs. Hudson, by the way. I borrowed Eleanor’s phone._

Though I’d never seen her text before, the message looked consistent. She seemed the type to bother with proper grammar and spelling, presuming someone had shown her how to operate the phone. Still, she hadn’t tried to call first, nor had she mentioned receiving any contact from school. Considering the lengths she’d gone to put me there, and the numerous calls the school should’ve sent her, that wasn’t right.

“Did anything happen to Aunt Rose or Daisy, today?” I spoke above the screen.

“Nothing I’ve heard. Call Sherrinford.” At least it wasn’t ‘call mother’. It seemed he’d caught on that was a bad idea. “Why?”

“Because mother talks to you. Bye.” I flipped back to the call screen to disconnect.

“Don’t you—“

I pressed end call. The line silenced. I stared down at the text, concentrating.

Whoever sent the text must have been lying. Otherwise, the message made no sense. The new question was why. It could be a trap, or possibly an excuse. In either case, it was suspicious. No one I knew who would immediately benefit from calling me away, so it was someone I didn’t know, someone who still had a vested interest. Maybe it was Moriarty. Maybe it was father. In either case, I could assume I had ten minutes before Mycroft could tell the actual Mrs. Hudson where I was. Those would have to be well applied.

I switched back to the text menu and called Eleanor Brown’s mobile. The line was busy. I tried the number a second time, just in case. Another call attempted to interrupt mine. Unlisted number. Mycroft. I pressed ignore, flipped to the text screen and sent a text back to Brown’s phone.

_Port angeles inn on east 2 nd. Outside. You?_

My fingers wrapped around the phone, tensing with anticipation. Thirty seconds later, a reply appeared. _I’m just leaving home now. Can you walk to the café by the ramp to the 101? It may be quicker to meet there._

I sent my response with barely a thought. _Yes._ _Call. I’ll wait inside._

Ten more seconds. Another text. _Thank you, dear._

Thirty seconds passed with no replies. The phone rang again. Another blocked number. Still Mycroft.

I dug my fingers into the side of my phone, dislodged the SIM card, tossed it in my pocket and turned the phone off. No point in making things easier for Mycroft to track me further. I had someone to find.


	7. Occam's Razor

**Chapter Six**

I made my hiding spot inside a shrub by the entrance to the café. My phone propped against my left knee, pointing through the branches towards the street. Rain drops trickled across the screen.  I’d barely been waiting for fifteen minutes, yet hours of anticipation had passed.

Another car drifted across the screen. A green hummer, muddy from off-roading. Going significantly faster than any other car on the road. They didn’t stop, obviously. The gust they produced was so loud, it nearly overtook a faint rumble from my left.

I shifted my head to the left, glimpsing towards the source. A grey Honda civic, recently washed, merged in in from a side-street. Tires new. License plate local, Washington. A third sticker rest beside the vehicle inspection notice. A car rental agency was listed beside it. Promising.

Careful not to budge, I turned my phone towards the car and pressed record. My eyes drifted from the screen to the sight ahead. The license plate was just as pristine as the rest of the car, number NZ1 8P9K, framed with the name of the rental agency. The car turned into the lot. I could barely make out the image of the driver from this distance. It was an adult somewhere between 5’8” and 6”0”, Caucasian with dark hair, no fringe, which was either long for a man or short for a woman. They were in an old v-neck shirt, light for the weather.

The car’s pace slowed considerably, drifting closer to the café. The driver turned their head towards the building, searching. This had to be them. I ran my fingers across the screen, zooming in on the face. I stopped mid-movement at the sight.

It was father.

No. Perhaps. He didn’t match any projections of how he should’ve aged, but the likeness was near exact to his last known appearance. From the wisps of his eyebrows as they grew wider yet thinner as they moved away from the center of his face to the freckle a few inches beneath his right eye, this man embodied the late Siger Holmes.

On some level, I’d known it could be. There was a note. On another, there were enough inconsistencies to doubt it. For all I could be certain, this was the work of a plastic surgeon and a stranger who knew he had a fortune to lay claim to. But, the likeness was flawless. There’d never been a body. Occam's razor. This was him.

I pulled my hands out of the branches, slipped the phone into my pocket, leaned back against the wall and stood in wait. The branches scratched at my hair. There may have been leaves involved, but I couldn’t focus on that. All the attention I had was set on his face.

Father turned his head towards the passenger side window. He stared through it, at me. For a moment, it seemed he was barely breathing from the shock. I pushed through the bushes and wandered towards the car.

He reached across to the passenger side door and rolled down the window. As the glass gave way, I could see the popped blood vessels and glossy overlay of contacts irritating his eyes. Rain seeped through my shirt, the wind chilling my back.

We stared at each other for ten seconds, my words locked in my throat. He broke the silence. “You came.”

“Obviously.”

Father swallowed. His eyes shifted towards the lock on the passenger side door. A slight shake passed through his fingers as he clutched the plastic handle and pushed it open. “Get in.”

I pulled my rucksack off my shoulder, dropped it on the floor and slid into the adjacent seat. My head turned towards him, waiting for a signal. He swallowed a breath, visibly anxious. Otherwise, he wasn’t speaking.

“What happened? Why are you back?” I asked abruptly.

Father reached towards the drivers side-view mirror. He stared at the surface, adjusting it. His stare never broke, as if intentionally not facing me. “Down. Below the window. Use the seat belt.”

I slid further down the seat, shrinking from sight until my eyes were level with the arm rest. I’d had to turn and bend my legs just to fit. A paper mat crinkled under my boots. The car was close to pristine, filled with the overpowering scent of multiple air fresheners. There was no trash, no music, and the dial on the radio hadn’t been turned for hours, if the dead frequency it was on was proof. Even the glove compartment door lacked scratches.

I looked to the rear-view mirror, struggling to catch sight of any part of my father from here. The side of his neck reflected overhead. He shifted the gear into reverse, leaving the lot.

“Where’re you going?” I asked over.

“Thruway. Harder to track.”

“Then why—“

Father cleared his throat. “Slow. Calm. We’ll get to it.”

I turned my head, looking towards another mirror. If I concentrated, I could make out an occasional road sign. We’d turned at the entrance ramp and were approaching eastward. He was telling enough truth to be honest, but eliminating enough answers to be deeply unsettling.

I waited for one more second before speaking. “Contacts?”

“Eyes aren’t what they used to be.”

Father’s hand reached up to adjust the upper mirror. From the angle he had moved it to, I could presume it was mine. His stare lingered on me in reluctant awe. “You changed. So much. Too much, maybe. I’m sorry for that, genuinely. Before anything else, I need you to know.”

“Then start explaining.”

He raised the mirror towards the back, and then looked back to the windshield. Though his expression was obscured, I could hear hesitance twist his voice. “I had to go, for your mother, your brothers, you. Only way to keep you from being dragged in-"

“To what?”

He exhaled deeply, still tense. “To save your lives. To, to keep him away from your mother. Your brothers. You.” I couldn’t read his expression, but it sounded genuine.

“From Moriarty?”

Father hunched over the steering wheel, avoiding my gaze in favor of the road. “From a serial killer. A stalker. The kind of demon you don’t believe exists until it crosses your path. He, would have killed you to get to me, so I left. That’s who,” he confessed, as if assuming I hadn’t read his letter or gotten the general message from any other statement he’d made in the last 24 hours. 

I did my best not to sound impatient. “The clarification’s appreciated, but why is that relevant, now?”

“Because you have to trust me.”

“No I don’t.”

“You listened to get in the car.”

“That seemed necessary.”

I tilted my head to face him as best I could, striving to catch a glimpse of anything I could read from down here, yet all I could see was that his shoes were newly polished. I closed my eyes instead.

“Why not call the police?” I asked.

“I did. They wouldn’t listen. Claimed the killings were bear attacks. No evidence, at least, not the kind that’s admissible in court. I found him, then he found me. I fled overseas. He’s been chasing me ever since.”

"Why come to me?"

"When you came here, you came to him. We’ve been stateside for months. Thank God I found you first.” Father changed the dial on the heating vents, turning it on slightly—made sense enough, considering the shirt he was in—and then set that hand on my upper arm. I could feel the chill of his fingers through my pea-coat. “You have to come with me, Sherlock. Out of town. Today. Only way I can protect you.”

Within a second, I was hit with a sudden sense of haziness. I pressed my hand over my mouth, masking a searing itch through a cough. My pulse jumped in my ears, rattling twice as frequently as it should. Mucus dripped on my palm. I tried to sniffle it away, but it kept running regardless. Even considering what I’d pulled at school, this wasn’t right.

I turned towards my left and slid my hand into my pocket, gripping my phone. I fumbled through the fabric to grab the SIM card and jammed it back inside. My fingers ran across the screen, trying to remember the keys without looking at them. I struggled to breathe past the boulder crushing my chest which didn't exist, but felt as if it were. “Where?”

“Vancouver. Victoria. Somewhere outside of the states. Make it harder for him to follow."

I slid my mobile onto the floor beneath my leg. The display screen charged up as the carrier flashed on screen, the signal re-connecting the phone. I struggled against my increasingly shaky hand to type a number in.

“Documentation?” I asked, increasingly breathless.

“Two doctored passports in the glove compartment. Your name’s Robert.”

I could barely sense my fingertips jab against the screen to type out an SOS to that Hooper girl. It was her or Mycroft and she’d ask fewer questions. _If no message in two hours, report stolen car license no nz1 8p9k. may need help – sh._

I was about to press send when I heard the heater. It was clicking periodically, like a gear to a clock. I stared into the vent. A thin plastic pipe pointed back, swaying with the air inside. I couldn’t tell where that pipe ran, but it probably involved an airborne toxin consistent with nerve gas. If it was, then the dosage was low.

I made a point of slowing my breathing, then looked to father. He stared ahead, still driving, completely unaffected.

My stare drifted downwards, towards the mark on his wrist. Four scars, each of them indented, faintly red, spaced at the same distance as incisors, similar to what I’d seen on John. Maybe this was what he knew. 

I added John’s number to the message, pressed send, and tucked the phone back into my pocket. I lifted my heavy hand towards the window crank. My finger grazed the handle.

“We’re moving. Don’t,” father ordered.

My throat was so irritated, I could barely finish the word. “But,” I coughed.

Father’s eyes darted towards me for such a short time, I may have imagined it. “What? What is it?”

“The car… someone… tampered, drugged car,” I coughed again.

I watched the car door through a squint. The textured plastic started twisting into a swirl of barely distinguishable nothing, to the point where I could barely make out the handle overhead.

Father’s voice echoed around me, muffled but bouncing, as if his words were being swallowed in cotton. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

Before I could perceive so much as a sound, I felt something solid smash against the back of my head. The world cut to black.


	8. Disillusionment

Evidently, I’d had better plans. 

My head was throbbing, which meant I was injured, but also that I had enough consciousness to think. That was good, considering. If I was right, a higher dose of exposure to a nerve agent like Tabun, Sarin or VX could’ve easily rendered me unconscious, comatose, paralyzed or dead. 

I forced my eyes to open. My surroundings were blurry, as could’ve been expected. What I could see didn’t look real. The luminescent white eyes of an angry dragon filled with lightning stared down upon me with a stare so intense, it tasted of lemon juice and cleaning solution. Its sparks tingled across my skin. Or the ceiling. It was probably the ceiling. It still looked like a dragon, though. Hallucinations were a known effect of nerve agents. I shouldn’t have been too surprised. 

Slowly, I struggled to tilt my head off the weight of my torso. It shifted about a centimeter before two mechanical hands held me down across the sidewalk. The screech of a metal rattle echoed through my skull. No, wait. Those were restraints. Restraints made more sense. 

A harmony of growls, snaps and jingles filled the air. I couldn’t trust that those were there, either. Sweet smells of baking sugar melded with formaldehyde and still more cleaning solution. I was on a slant. The walls were plain. Maybe a morgue? Or a dentist’s office. It still looked like a dungeon—one which, for whatever reason, was now changing colors. 

My forehead pounded, again. My tongue stung as if rotting from being stuffed with acid and candy floss. The room twirled into itself, each object becoming less distinguishable as more than an expanding sphere of fractured light. I gagged accordingly. No. No, no, no. I had to stop perceiving. I had to think. 

However long I’d been unconscious, it was enough to put me in this room. If I was restrained, I was either violent or had been taken captive. I could remember father, faintly, though perhaps it wasn’t him after all. I knew that I’d been poisoned, so that was a memory as well. Maybe I should’ve called Mycroft. Endless torment was better than death. Then again, maybe he heard it regardless. Tapping my phone sounded like him.

I closed my eyes. Disorienting smells cluttered my perception. My body continuously fell through the floor, still being pulled by the tightening metal hands. I tried to wiggle my hand. Another shriek dug into my brain in reply. Ok. I could move. 

Next, I tried my leg. A louder shriek sounded. I grit my teeth, which, for some reason, seemed to mush together. I ignored that to reach for my phone. The restraint yanked me back onto the tale. An ache ran through my arm. Something clunked against the ground. It may have been my phone. 

“You’re awake? Shit,” a voice echoed, the pitch reverberating just enough to make my head spin more. It was muffled and distorted, but it sounded like father. 

I took a deep breath. My chest tightened around it. I tried to make a noise, yet nothing worked. 

A block of ice pressed against my forehead, pushing it back down. The chill coursed down my spine, bringing me to shudder involuntarily. The chains screeched once more. 

“I’m sorry, Sherlock. Really. There’s nothing else for anesthesia. You’ll have to endure.” A second hand pressed down on my arm, holding me in place. The weight of the chains was nothing in contrast to the spike. “But I’ll be here. I promise. I won’t leave you. Not again. Never again.” 

The sentimentality in his tone was likely meant as a comfort, yet I couldn’t help to hear it as a threat.

I tried to open my eyes, to turn my head and speak to him. A human-shaped blob, presumably father, knelt down beside me. It may have been an attempt at support, but the grip on my wrist was numbing my hand. He leaned what I presumed to be his head against the side of the possible embalming table. 

“Then, don’t,” I moaned. 

The hand of ice ran up my sleeve, pushing something out of the way, maybe the shackle, or possibly clothes. I struggled to turn towards him.

For the first three seconds, I could barely feel the bite, only a faint warmth tingling at my wrist. In that fleeting moment, there was almost a sense of relief as the cold subsided. Then, it hit. 

From the tips of my fingers to my elbow, I was searing, boiling from inside-out. My jaw snapped open and my head snapped back with an oncoming screen. The sheer reflex to do so pounded on my eardrums to the extent of bursting. 

Father shoved a piece of cloth into my mouth before I could. Both of his hands pressed the fabric inside, gagging me. The cold of his hands fought against the searing fire that was creeping through my throat. No infections spread this fast, and fevers didn’t move. Whatever I’d been infected with was in my bloodstream, so, a rapid-spreading toxin. Probably not a hemotoxin, then, in spite of it spreading in the blood. It was too fast. Tetrodotoxin was fast, but that was numbing, and I could feel every second. Necrotoxin, perhaps, not that I could see to confirm. Not that it would help.

If this wasn’t dying, then it was worse, even more so because so much was missing. I knew the voice. I knew the face. This was my father. Was he mad, maybe late-onset paranoid schizophrenic, or was there somehow a circumstance where murdering me was a legitimate logical choice? 

I suspected I was sweating, but it wasn’t going to help. The shake of the chains was nothing in contrast. Nothing I’d ever felt before could. My eyes snapped shut against my will. My body writhed against the table, fighting against itself. I struggled and failed to roll off the table. 

“It’s long now, but this’ll pass. I promise,” father called, his words tasting like coal. I think he was shouting, but I could hardly hear him over the pain.

I writhed again. The table rocked beneath me, then stopped just as soon. The pressure in my mouth lightened accordingly, so I presumed he was holding it still. I struggled to speak past the cloth, yet all that escaped was a low, muffled scream. I could hear the clamor escalating as my chains fought back, followed by something slamming. A stream of light trickled through my eyelids. Even they were searing, now, yet somehow they didn’t feel the same. An all-consuming whiteness flooded the room. 

Yet again, my eyes shot open. In spite of the pain, somehow, my sight had grown clearer. I could see the rough outlines of a cement box, illuminated by the intense glow of fluorescent lighting. A folding metal door sealed the exit of what was either a garage or a storage facility. Father hovered over me, his hands pinning my shoulders to what I still supposed was a table. The door rattled shut, yet father hadn’t moved. Someone else was here. 

I gathered my will to take the one action I was capable of and screamed again. I’d meant to say Mycroft, but all that made it out was an incomprehensible jumble. Close enough. 

A shot fired across the room, straight over my head. The casing bounced, then clanked against the ground. So did the bullet. 

“Step away,” the second voice warned. It was the nurse, John. His voice smelled like burnt raspberries. I gagged on the smell. Sound to taste; odd type of synesthesia. 

John dropped the gun. Somehow, in spite of the fog of agony still cluttering my skull and the lingering flavor of charcoal, the reverberation allowed me to hear the lay-out of the room. He gripped the top of his cane, twisting the handle while pressing the tip into the ground. 

Father’s hands lifted off of me and slowly backed away. Each methodical step he took echoed across the walls, bouncing through my brain. On the fourth step, he leapt off the ground and lunged towards John with his arms outstretched, bracing to attack.   
John stepped to his right, sending another sound wave across the room. He ducked beneath father’s arm, grabbed it with one hand and twisted it behind father’s back.   
Father tried to turn his wrist out of John’s grasp, but John turned his hand in unison, blocking the move. John pushed forward, knocking father against the metal wall. The sheet clamored from the impact, creating a map of the storage unit.   
I bit down on the cloth and shut my eyes. The vision stayed consistent. Even without sight, I could hear enough to perceive everything. A fridge stood at the front of the room, running from a generator inside. The gas hadn’t seemed to be bothering either of them. The embalming table I was on rest at the center, directly beneath the fluorescent lamp.   
Father stood still. He raised his free hand, opened his palm and pressed it back against the wall. His expression softened with resignation and a touch of anxiety.   
“Surrender. He’s yours. Go. Take him,” his head tilted with a twitch, gesturing towards me.  
John pushed his shoulder into father’s torso, still holding him in place. He twisted the top off of his cane, brandishing a knife with the shape of a straightened claw. He pressed the point against Siger’s throat, signaling his threat. “Stay there.”

As John lifted his hand from father’s chest and prepared to walk away, father swiped his leg under John’s to knock him over. John rushed to step aside, narrowly evading him. While he was doing so, father sprang towards him. He grabbed John by the shoulder and twisted, turning John with him. John raised his knife to father’s arm in a counter-attack I presumed intended to make him stop. He didn’t. 

The moment he was in range, Father wrapped his opposite hand around John’s head and pulled him down. His teeth sunk into John’s throat in a manner oddly reminiscent of Dracula. 

Maybe I was actually on a hallucinogenic in tandem with the toxins. That’d explain why these symptoms made no sense.

In spite of the gaping wound he may or may not have had on his neck, John took advantage of father’s stance to reach under his own arm and stab father in the gut. The blade pierced through his clothes, into his stomach and back out again. 

Father’s mouth lifted off John’s neck. He pressed one hand against the wound and bent over in pain. His eyes widened with increasing shock. “The hell’s that?” he slurred, his words somehow slower than normal. 

As father was speaking, John planted his good foot on top of father’s. He pulled his arm back slightly, aiming his knife for the center of father’s chest. The blade grazed against his torso, but no further than. 

Father leapt backwards, bounding atop the fridge. John sprinted after him, knife brandished. He stabbed his knife into the door, aiming for father’s foot. John’s knife pierced through the freezer door, a small burst of cold air puffing through the new-found hole along with the top of father’s shoe, but otherwise missed. 

The ceiling light swayed overhead as father found his balance perching on the light. My head ached with the same wobbling inconsistency. Pieces of furniture toppled in his wake, including the refrigerator. John stumbled backwards to avoid the oncoming crash. Bags of liquid spilled across the floor in what seemed to be slow motion. Or everything else was unusually fast. I couldn’t be sure of that—couldn’t be sure of much of anything, anymore, aside from the pain. That was definitely there. 

Father and John stared at each other in a held moment of tension, each of them uncertain, waiting for the other to act. 

John kept his focus on father as he trudged across the room, each step considerably less energetic than usual. In spite of the smoke, I could smell blood congealing over his wound. Or perhaps it was the floor. Or he’d been handling a coin collection and I’d hallucinated the rest. Hallucinations still seemed likely. 

Regardless of the circumstance, the table I’d been restrained to lifted off the ground, carrying me along with it. A hand brushed against my wrist, sending a sting and a tingle through it simultaneously. I writhed away from the source and screamed into the blanket. The table shook in unison. John struggled to hold the table as steadily as possible. He inhaled slowly, bracing to speak. 

The overhead lamp shook. Father leapt back to the ground. My head snapped back in response.

John dropped the table from his grasp. Before gravity had the opportunity to take over, he threw his knife across the room straight towards father, and then picked the table up before it hit the ground. To avoid the trajectory of the knife, father shifted his course by dodging to his left. By the time he’d changed courses, John was already at the door. 

For the second time, a burst of light flooded the dimming room, though this one was softer. The door slammed behind us. 

John set the table on the floor. A lock clicked, holding the opening down. The metal rattled with another impact. My head pounded in unison. No. I had to keep thinking. Stay conscious. Do something. 

John turned his head from one side to the other, checking the facility for something. He muttered a sentence that may or may not have included a person’s grudge against a camera while kneeling at my side. He pressed one hand over my wrist, lowered his head and pressed his mouth over the point of injury, sucking the venom out. Odd. That technique was outdated, ineffective. A military doctor should’ve known.

I opened my mouth as far as I could with the intention to say something. All I could manage was a weak groan as silence settled into darkness.


	9. Inference

**Chapter Eight**

The sting of a bad trip rattled my cortex. Even without opening my eyes, I could tell my surroundings had dulled. I did so regardless.

The room was oppressively dark, bordering on sensory deprivation. A reddish hue beamed from a heart monitor, casting an outline around the hospital bed. A clock hung from the opposite wall, its hands obstructed by distance and my own limitations.

Metal cuffs strapped my wrists to the bed. An IV attached to my arm, running a drip. Even in this lack of light, there were no distortions in coloration between the liquid and the plastic, and no labels on the bag—a saline drip or dextrose, not blood.

There was a consistent throbbing at my lower arm, slightly stronger than the generalized soreness. The finely netted texture of gauze wrapped around the spot I remembered a mouth.

The lack of hospital guards roaming my door did mean, whatever occurred, it hadn’t been interpreted as suicidal. The restraints clinked, hardly more forceful than a bell against bone. The hallway outside was silent, nigh-deserted, without as much as a suppressed rubber sole smacking the tile.

Logistically, a substantial percentage of what I remembered had to be hallucinations. The trick would be deciding which parts, if any, weren’t.

I doubted the conversation with Mycroft was a false. My phone log would confirm it. I could retread the conversation with him later. Everything after that was worth questioning.   

Based on my prior patterns of behavior and the methods of treatment, the most probable cause was an overdose. The scenario aligned at least roughly with prior patterns of behavior. I looked for father. He didn’t show. Bored, I slipped in a public bathroom, used my emergency supply, and, by negligence or intent, entered a physical or emotional state that necessitated treatment. The tactile and visual hallucinations, while uncommon, could’ve been provoked by anxiety prior to ingesting the drug.  Careless, but admittedly plausible.

Still, there were alternatives. I couldn’t see without removing the bandage whether the injury matched teeth. If it did, then, that still didn’t dismiss the possibility it was self-inflicted. I needed my phone. Which meant I needed out of the restraints.

There were three differences between being handcuffed in my prior probable hallucination and this moment. No witnesses were present. I wasn’t disoriented. I had an IV.  

I was cognizant enough that its intended purpose, which, in this context, would be to expedite the elimination of the drugs from my system, was no longer necessary.

I planted one foot along the bed, angled my head to grab the cord between my teeth, and pulled. The sheets rustled lightly with each tug. I repeated the motion, the cord nudging slightly up and my arm slightly down each time. On the sixth pull, I’d extracted the IV.  

Fortunately, the needle wasn’t particularly thick. Ordinarily, handcuff locks were picked with bobby pins or paper clips. Needles were approximately equivalent in size and material. The malleability was unideal, but workable. After all, it wasn’t unheard of for technicians to bend an IV needle fifteen degrees or so for ease of insertion. An extra seventy five was within reason.

I gripped the corded end between grit teeth. My ears stayed as open as I could will, checking for disruptions. Thus far, none.

I lowered my head level to my wrist and dipped the needle halfway into the lock, to bend the needle in the angle of the keyhole. At the desired point, I leaned left, molding the needle to the shape of the corresponding key. I retracted the needle, repeated the motion at an earlier point in the lock, and removed it again. Still no disruptions.

I jabbed the bent needle into the double lock and turned my head counter-clockwise, away from the lock’s direction of travel. At first, nothing. Second, same. The fourth attempt, the needle’s tip knocked against the correct bar in the handcuff’s housing, disabling the lock. I then adjusted my mouth’s grip on the needle, moved it into the now-accessible hole for the single lock, and turned clockwise. The lock released.

Some three minutes later, with my right hand, I unlocked the left side. I stabbed the IV into the top of my pillow, where it’d be moderately unobtrusive, and staggered to the fabric pile at my bedside.

Approximately forty three seconds of quiet rummaging later, I had my mobile in hand. The SIM card was still inserted, so, either I’d been aware long enough to put it back in, or I’d never removed it. I turned on the phone and waited for the answer.  

Fifteen messages flashed on the lock screen, all but two of them from unlisted numbers, Mycroft’s presumably. The listed number was Mrs. Hudson’s. I flicked past them to my texts. Nine messages. Seven from Hooper, entering varying numbers of question marks and methods of inquiring what I meant. The last two were from John, both three words. ‘Where are you?’ and ‘On the way’.

My thumb hovered over my contacts list. I could call someone. My phone had access to send a message when I recalled being in father’s car, so, Mycroft would’ve triangulated my location during the incident. John may have been present. Wherever I’d been, whatever had happened, someone brought me here. It was just as obvious as the other glaring truth—that telling the wrong person would get me branded high, mad or a hybrid thereof.

A vibration passed through my phone. The sound bounced off the wall. I’d had to answer to stop from alerting the hospital I was conscious. The instant the connection stabilized, my options were limited. Either I turned off the mobile until they’d stop trying to call, or I stayed on, kept hushed, and coped with Mycroft.

I’d come to terms with these options until I heard something on the other side—not a person, but atmospheric sound. The whir of a rotating fan, swaying on crescendo towards the receiver. A squeak of a chair against wood floorboards. Padding patting by a surface, maybe paws. Flies buzzing. Interior sounds, and not ones I’d heard in months. 

“Sherlock, are you there?” Sherrinford’s enunciation had shifted. There wasn’t as much fluctuation in his voice as at the funeral, deadpan, mildly sardonic—a tone he adopted when speaking around a beard. Why he allowed himself to grow one so often, I’d speculated as frequently as it occurred. Probable cause, laziness.

“Mycroft spoke with you,” I muttered.

“Don’t hang up, I’m not on orders. Tried to reach you of my own accord. And succeeded by pure luck and your evident present mercy.”

“No commands from Mycroft? Must be the sole man in Britain without them,” I dismissed, a touch less sarcastic than I intended. Sometimes, the country did seem Mycroft’s personal playset.

“That he called in the first place shows how desperate he was for someone to speak to. Doesn’t bother with me, much.” A hint of Sherrinford’s trademark melancholy skipping across the satellites to my ears. He meant to sound lighthearted. He was just terrible at matching his intent.

“Honestly, I’m surprised he relinquished the dessert tray that long.”

“He didn’t, really. Hadn’t needed to. My second language is garbled-by-dessert.”

“This isn’t what you called for,” I stated, blunt. It wasn’t as if teasing Mycroft, or, for that matter, anyone but himself, was a habit of Sherrinford’s. He was a bleeding heart far before a brain.

A long inhale crackled against the receiver. Each moment’s pause betrayed futile concerns. “You have so much potential, Sherlock. I’m not sure you see it, since it’s so innate to you, since you’re so close to Mycroft—“

Had I no other motive, I’d hang up. Sentimentality was imminent. I was sure I could infer the obligatory supportive pleas. Except, Sherrinford’s pleas were informed by Mycroft’s interpretation of events. Whatever other people believed had happened, it was something Sherrinford would perceive as terrible enough to prompt whatever he was about to say.

He cleared his throat, giving my last warning for the length of the speech to follow. “You might not expect it, might not believe me, but, I swear, I do know what it’s like to be constricted. Alone. I—“ he paused, swallowing, to gather words he wasn’t sure how to articulate without sounding as ridiculous as he invariably would to me.

I sat on the bed, at a moment’s notice from the position the staff anticipated I be in. The ear I kept away from the receiver attended to the hall, listening for anyone at all. Still, nothing. I didn’t bother speaking. Sherrinford had lectured vegetable gardens. He didn’t need affirmation to ramble.

“It’s the nature of youth to have false clarity. Every man, person, at that age, we know just enough to assume we know everything worth awareness, that the world doesn’t fit, and the ills and ignorance are all so vile, that either you ignore it, or the rage overtakes you. For most of them, their presumptuousness is stupidity. They do something dumb, and it fades. But for you, disillusionment has evidence. It’s so palpable, so real, you either burn in rage that gets dismissed by others’ ignorance, or you drown in pointless idleness, in distractions, in ways to stop the sting.

“Because everything is dumb. Everything is relatively defined and wrongly prioritized. Our bodies mean nothing, our values are arbitrary and culturally constrained, and the answers to our problems are so obvious, so close, that no one else sees them. And it seems easier to stop there, to quell the anger or the lonely, to mask it by corroding ourselves in the same way as everything else, lost in deterioration, a placated, beautiful waste. Sherlock, did you put the phone down?” Sherrinford’s pitch raised at the inquiry, marginally less patient than before.

In summary, Sherrrinford was desperate to connect with me, most likely from suspicion I was going to do something exceptionally dangerous and/or stupid. Furthermore, he wanted affirmation that he had a basis through which to understand me.

My eyes trailed back to the mobile and the faint glow the screen cast amidst the dark. “Yes.”

Sherrinford tensed right back to his train of thought and the increasingly deliberate gloom. “I used to feel that, adrift in the wasteland. It took a drink to pull me in, to dull the resentment, the dwelling, to cloud myself until thought had no hold nor meaning. I still want that feeling. Every time the pressure rises, that memory calls. But I hold back. I already squandered so much. So many opportunities. So many futures, worlds where those obvious solutions meant something, where what I hated so much, in some tiny way, I stopped.

“I’ll always, think, exist as this person I twisted into. There will always be a part of me that belongs to drinking. And I know it’s not quite the same, what you found, but, you don’t need to hide the problem, that you have that fraction of you, as long as you don’t think it _is_ you. You can be so much more than that. You’re already more. Not just than me, but, of Mycroft, too. You’re not just smart, you’re curious. Don’t squander your mistakes by copying mine. They’re not as worth making as it feels. Please.”

So, the current interpretation of events was an overdose via something ingested deliberately. Whether the hospital had received any blood test results or not had potential for being worth seeing. I doubt they’d have tested for nerve agents, though.

“I understand,” I answered, not bothering to show much change. It didn’t seem worth the bother to placate his delusions of helping. “You look better as an inactive alcoholic. An inflamed nose didn’t suit you.”

“That was my immune system, allergies. It was never consistent.”

“Your liquid concealer wasn’t, either. A shade off from your skin tone. Re-appropriated from, which was it, then, Beth?”

Sherrinford’s ex-fiancee was renowned in our family for two things. She was the remarkably terrible person who left him at the altar. Also, she was a great way to derail any unwanted conversation with Sherrinford into an instant sulk. It’d marginally improved since he’d started dating someone who wasn’t obviously cheating on him with a dive bar band guitarist, but, it was the difference between a serial and a spree killer. Quicker, but nonetheless problematic.

The deflation in his self-confidence was so quick, it bordered on audible. It took an extra fifteen seconds for him to speak. “I’m not even talking about it.”

I checked the empty hallway, the pulled the phone off to check the screen. The time flashed three thirty seven—afternoon for Sherrinford. Here, it explained the lack of supervision. Night shift, shorter staff. One accident downstairs would stop everything.

I took advantage of the pause as the build up to an excuse. “I have to go. Nurses.”

Sherrinford’s tongue stumbled to catch up with something I’d not realized he hadn’t known. “Wait, Sherlock. You’re still in the hosp—?“

I considered that the time zone shift had slipped Sherrinford’s mind. He’d at least know I was in overnight, or he wouldn’t have called. In any case, it wasn’t worth correcting. I’d gotten enough to infer most of what Mycroft knew. From that, there was only one person who could know the truth—the one who’d either found or called me in.

I changed from my hospital gown back to my tattered clothes. A few stains were still visible upon inspection. Sweat and deodorant beneath the arms. Mud of varying consistencies caking my shoes. Grass on my jeans, two small tears and blood flecks on my jacket, and, most tellingly, no t-shirt left. Whatever condition it is, the staff hadn’t wanted to scavenge it.

I chewed off the hospital bracelet, buttoned the coat, flipped through my smartphone to the browser and plugged in a number to the search. My eyes stayed on the screen while I walked through the hall, straight out the front door. Only one nurse stopped to wave at me. I asked her for directions to another ER, claiming the wait was too long and the cut I wanted looked at not quite that urgent. She let me go without another thought.

 


	10. Breaking

**Chapter Nine**

I used what battery was left on my phone to reverse look-up John’s phone number. It belonged to a Harriet living in Seattle. Dead end. I entered his name in the white pages and filtered by zip code. The most likely address indicated he was living in a cabin off of the Salish Sea, in what was typically a vacation property, most likely renting. It made sense, considering he’d appeared suddenly.    

Some odd minutes of marching later, I found the cabin. The dusk was dimming, less than two hours from daybreak, putting the time somewhere in the estimated range of five to six thirty the morning. The house seemed well cared for. The windows were pitch black, dead to waking. My mobile was dead, so I had to settle for squinting through the fading moonlight to spot what details I could.

A dark blue truck sat in a cobblestone driveway. The doors, tires and license plate were flecked with mud, too thick for it to have come from the roads recently. It hadn’t been moved in the past few hours, if the film of dew around it were any indication. The grass was tall and wildly uneven, no footsteps throughout. The sidewalk and porch were clear as well, no traces of dirt from their exterior. I scuffed my shoes through the grass, attempting to brush off what muck I could—best I not leave a trail.

I took a step on the driveway, then stared at the track. The outline of my shoe’s imprint shone beneath me. Not working.

I took off my shoes, tucked them beneath my arm and crept up the sidewalk. No footprints, this time. Good.

I continued to the front porch. Worn pieces of deck furniture, all whicker, a matching set, sat beneath shuttered windows. The patio floor was fading, its paint worn down from rain. I came to a stop along the front wall, directly between a window and front door, yet out of sight from both.

I pulled my sleeve around my hand, grabbed the doorknob and slowly pushed inwards. As anticipated, the door didn’t budge.  

I crouched lower to pull up the welcome mat. No key there. I turned to my right, considering the mats beneath the furniture as hiding spots, then decided against it—they weren’t moved often enough. Shame my rucksack was missing. Lock pick kit would make this much simpler.

There was a screen beneath the shutters, but the glass only blocked the upper half. Hadn’t bothered to move it down for winter, yet. The owner may as well have sent me an invite personally. 

I slid my finger between the shutters and pushed upright, flipping the latch out of place. The shutters swung open. I ducked beneath the window frame, then stared in. The living room was empty, dark. The muffled shouts of two over-modulating speakers, possibly three, echoed through the walls, into the hallway. Music and a pair of voices blurred together into a barely distinguishable mass. Most likely a TV, though why they’d be playing so loudly, I wasn’t sure. Hearing problems, perhaps. That’d mean someone other than John was home.

I wrapped one hand around the edge of the shutter and used the other to grab the sharp end of the hooking latch. With as much force as I could quietly apply, I tore the hook through the window, poking a hole into the top edge of the screen. I dug my fingers into the hole and tore diagonally through the screen. My fingers were red and one was twitching, but it was done. I steadied myself on each side of the frame and entered the house.

I pulled my sleeves over my hands, pushed the glass panel for the window down behind me and set the latch. No need to leave the invitation open for someone else.

My footsteps slowed by necessity, their impact as soft as I could manage.  Dust crept up. If I’d found a light source, I envisioned flecks of dead cells were drifting through each room.

The walls were lined with logs, as anticipated from a cabin. The furniture was simple, standard and well-worn, another matching set. All of it had been here longer than John had. The sole items that looked even remotely personal were the laptop on the log coffee table, a stack of DVDs, their titles obscured by a lack of light, and a shelf of books so thick I presumed they were medical.

A faint flicker of light flashed through an open doorway. I took a step back instinctively, pressing against the wall. The orchestral score amplified, encroaching from the same direction. I snapped my head towards the source and walked into the kitchen.

“You know, I never understood all these elaborate tortures. It's the simplest thing... to cause more pain than a man can possibly endure,” a voice struck through the walls, followed by a loud smack, amplified by speakers. The beam and sound were cracking under a nearby door, fluttering intermittently, presumably the telly. Said door was so close to the exterior wall, it must’ve lead to stairs. A basement.

I tried to listen to the house, for any other sound. Nothing. No creaks in the ceiling, no calls upstairs, no alarms, nothing of note except the basement. If it wasn’t John, they’d know where he was.

The television continued. “And of course, it's not only the immediate agony, but the knowledge... that if you do not yield soon enough... there will be little left—“

I consciously ignored the audio, pressed one hand against the door, twisted the handle and pulled. It didn’t budge. I leaned against the surface and peered through the crevice. A bolt and chain were both set on the upper left side, locking it. The hinges weren’t visible from this side, indicating the door swung inwards. I leaned my ear to the door and knocked at the panel. The sound echoed. Like many interior doors, it was hollow, thereby weakest at the frame.

A muffled scream crackled in the speakers and through the wood. Immediately, it was swallowed by a howl, three times as loud and from a single direction. The door shook from residual force.

I stepped back, raised one leg upright and plowed into the door repeatedly. On the fourth strike, the wood cracked through the center and broke off its hingest. The middle chunk toppled down the staircase, onto the tile floor.

The howl pierced my eardrums. I latched onto the doorframe, steadying myself. I stared through the hole. Both the floor and the lower steps were coated in deep scratches, claw marks in sets of five ran deep into the faux-wood floor to the point where cement was visible. The first four claws all ran parallel, equally spaced, but the fifth was shallower and out of alignment to the rest, like a thumb.

A snarl sounded off the wall, rattling pipes, shelves, keys, the telly and what sounded strangely like chains. leaned my torso through the door and turned.

A cage stood at the back left corner of the room. Three overlapping sets of metal bars, all running in different directions, formed a cage so collectively thick, I could hardly discern the outline of a creature inside. It was marginally larger than the size of a man with enlarged hands and feet, too disproportionate to be a disguise, covered in dusty tan fur, though it seemed brown in the lack of light. Its nose pulled out to the length of its chin, where it flattened to a snout. Its canine teeth protruded, poking over its lips at uneven slants. It crouched on hind legs with a curved, unstable pose, struggling against the chains that pinned it. The wall clamored.

The creature bit along its chains, shaking its head. It stumbled back, then tried again, its stance swaying to lean predominantly towards its right side. A scar pushed into its lower left leg, fur matted around the point of impact. The creature’s eyes were barely visible, but they were wide, sharper than a wolf’s with far more of a visible sclera. His irises were dull, dark blue.

Against my better judgment, I held the stare.  “John?”

How that seemed the obvious conclusion was more challenging to articulate than it was to know. The body language couldn’t be a direct translation, but the coloration, the stance and the scar, they all matched too well.

Furthermore, at the sound of the name, the wolf’s eyes rose to mine. There was no emotion in them but feral hatred, an automatic defensiveness, but the longer they held, the more clearly they belonged to the mysterious school nurse.

So, werewolf, not vampire. There was diversity in my probable delusions. Good to know.

I glanced towards the telly. A set of keys rest directly across the room from the cage. They could’ve been thrown there from the other side. It was plausible he’d locked himself in there, though how he’d get out, I wasn’t as sure. I supposed the chains were looser on a human form. One of the poles might disconnect to reach the key as well, though I couldn’t imagine that’d be quick.

The wolf lunged, its left hand smacking the bars. It snarled in my direction, baring its fangs in a threat. I pulled away from the door, back into the hall upstairs. His growl echoed up the walls.

I paced to the opposite side of the hall, found a large card table and pressed that up against the door. The sound muffled slightly. I leaned my back against the cupboard, slid to the floor and stared blankly away. The lights of the TV kept flickering, bouncing across the cabinets in a pattern too unstable to trace past the fact that it existed.

I’d wait until morning. The restraints were steady. If my instincts were wrong, John would be back soon, and even if they weren’t, he had plenty to explain.

* * *

 

“Sherlock,” Mrs. Hudson’s voice called. An alarm clock growled in my ear. I pulled my pillow over my face, muffling the sound. It didn’t stop her.  “You’re already late. Time’s not going backwards, you know.”

I fought my way through the mass of covers and emerged from a mass of blankets on the floor. My neck cracked as I rose to observe the blurry room. Two computer monitors and stacks of books were sprawled across the floor. At first glance, it was all white, blindingly so. The longer I stared, the more my surroundings came into focus.

My reflection stared back from a mirror on my dresser. My face was completely clear, no pores, and my eyes flashed between colors, turning gray, blue, green and back again in rapid rotation. I couldn’t remember a mirror, there.

The instant that thought occurred, the mirror vanished. I grabbed the side of my bookshelf and rose to my feet. The carpet sank far more than it should. I looked down. At first glance, it was two inches higher than normal and slightly off white. The color faded upon eye contact, correcting to what I was supposed to see.

I pulled my phone from my pocket. It turned on, until I realized the battery was dead. Then, the screen flashed black. Either I was right back to hallucinating, or dreaming.

I opened the door to the hallway and stared outside. For that first second, the path was endless, the walls blue, yet covered with nothing but mirrors. By the second, the walls and photographs had flickered back to their default in reality. The scents of eggs and ham wafted up the stairs, or at least the expectation of it had, which was close enough to perceive as true, here.

“Sherlock, is that you?”

I set my head against the door frame and shut my eyes. “I’m sleeping.”

“Then get up, dear. School’s not waiting.”

“No. Literally. It’s inconsistent with reality. I’m hallucinating or asleep,” I shouted back, hoping that would stop her.

No luck. “That’s wonderful. Do you want turkey or bologna for a sandwich? Don’t tell me to send nothing. Carol Jensen’s boy says you keep throwing your food out.” I was fairly sure she’d said that before. Last Thursday, to be exact.

With more exhaustion than I should’ve felt, I strode towards the stairwell. I leaned over the railing, towards the kitchen. Yet again, the doorway was a different color, then corrected on sight. Mrs. Hudson stood at the stove, finishing an omelet.

When my foot hit the third step, the whole house dimmed. The fan shattered, the windows boarded up. A second figure appeared by the table, holding Mrs. Hudson from behind. He was almost six feet with blood red eyes, a mouth with fangs but no lips and no other facial features. It held a tape recorder beside her head, repeating her words in perfect clarity, “Sherlock, you’re already late,”

Another flash, and Mrs. Hudson’s body was a corpse across the floor, her blood spreading across the surface. Dozens of puncture wounds stabbed through her clothes, all of them the shape of a mouth. The figure stood directly in front of me. His face was my father’s.

“Rationalizing in your sleep? You really are my boy,” he stated, his voice rising to a pitch that was borderline chipper.

I outstretched a hand to grab him by the throat. My fingers phased through him, into nothing. He smiled gently back, smug, yet with a dissonant calm that, in another context, implied reassurance.

Again, the tile changed beneath me, from the quaint linoleum of Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen to the expansive marble tile of my family’s estate. The sole constant was Mrs. Hudson’s body, still sprawled across the floor. Hundreds of bitten corpses scattered around her, none of which I could see past the increasing number of wounds. Through all of this, the figure of my father kept staring, watching my every breath. His smile spread when I looked back.  

“Oh, and keep the werewolf. An untrained dog that rips people’s throats out in delirium, and then shoots them. Imagine the complaint forms to the neighborhood watch! Before it kills them, I mean.” He never would’ve said that, not phrased that way. Whoever this was, they were too casual, too cheerful.

“You’re not father.”

As if to prove my point, the creature in my father’s form let out an over-dramatic gasp. He slapped his hand to his face. “I’m not? Oh, God. My entire self-concept, just, whoosh,” he snapped his fingers.

A flash of light passed. I was back in Mrs. Hudson’s kitchen. My hands were white, shriveling to bone. A chill ran down my throat, burning my insides with frostbite. My breath rose in visible smoke, partially obscuring the false face. I could still hear its smile.

“Shouldn’t you be waking up right now? Or have you not mastered that part of lucid dreaming? Let me help.”

The ice melted to water inside my mouth. I tried to take a breath, yet the moment the air hit my nose or mouth, liquid filled them instead. There was no logical way this could be happening. I was dreaming. Though I repeated the point, I couldn’t stop the spasm.

“Wake up, honey.”


End file.
